Structure and Rupture in Literary History and Historiography

Abstract

In rethinking modern Chinese literary history, we may draw on insights from two relatively new approaches in the West: postmodern literary history as represented by the Harvard University Press’s “new history” series, and comparative literary history as realized in two multivolume literary histories on Central-Eastern Europe and Latin America, respectively. It is time to move research forward beyond the current divergence between a persistent lack of interest in Chinese literary history in English scholarship and an inundation of literary histories in Chinese. Recent calls in China for defamilarization and microhistories demonstrate the desire to break away from the orthodox model of comprehensive historiography, and a comparative examination of literary historiography in Chinese will further develop a new structural view of modern Chinese literary history in terms of rupture, diversity, and heterogeneity rather than the previous emphasis on continuity, singularity, and homogeneity.