China News Service, Hong Kong, July 14th. Title: New Works by Hong Kong Literary Critic Xu Zidong: Writing History of Literature Without the Name of History
China News Agency reporter Zeng Ping
Hong Kong literary critic Xu Zidong brought his latest book "Re-reading Chinese Novels in the 20th Century" at the 31st Hong Kong Book Fair held one year later.
"This is a newly compiled literary history without the name of literary history." Xu Zidong defined this nearly 600,000-word book in an exclusive interview with a reporter from China News Agency on the eve of the book fair, the thickest book he has ever written.
Xu Zidong studied under the well-known literary theorist Qian Gurong and has long studied Chinese writers such as Lu Xun, Zhang Ailing, and Yu Dafu.
Outside the study, he often publishes opinions in the media to make him known to the audience.
The new crown epidemic caused the book fair to be postponed twice, and Xu Zidong, who "has nothing else to do", immersed himself in this book.
It took about three years from conceiving an audio program that pursues a dialogue with the public to modifying and adding content and turning it into academic text.
I was first invited to write a brief history of Chinese literature in the 20th century.
Xu Zidong thought for a long time that "you must have the ability to write a complicated history to dare to write a brief history."
The history of writing must be collected like a textbook, and the background of the times, the life of the writer, and the evolution of creation are all indispensable. It can be achieved only by a few years.
But this work does have the idea of "rewriting the history of literature".
The writing structure is arranged in chronological order. From Liang Qichao's "Future of New China" in 1902 to Liu Cixin's "Three Body" in 2006, Xu Zidong presents 70 writers and their 93 works in the book in the form of comments and discussions.
Each work is a dot, and the dots are connected to form a line. Naturally, it is the history of the development of Chinese novels in the 20th century.
Different from past literary history, which emphasizes writers or relies on era writing, what Xu Zidong tries to establish is the possibility of reorganizing literary history with reading text as the center.
When Xu Zidong talked about literature, he often had a pair of crescent-like smiling eyes, as if he could talk with anyone.
This kind of internal and external temperament invisibly formed a certain mapping with his vision of the two readers of the new book.
The first is the teachers and students studying modern and contemporary literature in universities.
In the long run, Xu Zidong hopes that the vitality of this book will be enough to provide academic reference for modern and contemporary literature research.
Although the concept of Chinese literature in the 20th century has long been proposed, there are still very few literary history studies juxtaposing the late Qing Dynasty to the present.
Then there are non-literary readers with a secondary school degree or above.
"I don't know if there should be such a luxury." When Xu Zidong wrote this book, he referred to the lecture "Modern Literature Class" to remove fragmented oral expression, but he still hopes that readers will break through the circle.
Xu Zidong said that he neither likes intellectuals writing pretentiously advanced articles in small circles, nor does he have a good impression of overemphasizing the responsibility of intellectuals to enlighten the public.
Because the former lacks academic self-confidence, the latter shows arrogance.
He believes that intellectuals and scholars face the public, and there is nothing special about them: just talk about your research.
In the new book, Xu Zidong went straight to the masterpiece.
These tried-and-tested stories about various social strata written by every writer, whether "The True Story of Ah Q" or "Ordinary World", are all Chinese stories.
He does not agree that overseas scholars call the Chinese intellectuals "feel the time and worry about the country" as a limitation.
In an era when the world is studying China, the Chinese phenomenon is a world phenomenon.
"This book poses many challenges to the concept of literary history." Xu Zidong re-divisions different periods and writes his new perspectives on modern and contemporary literature.
Since modern and contemporary literature in Hong Kong and Taiwan is not part of the same mechanism as Mainland China, it is not included.
For the writers and works included, Xu Zidong refers to other academic works and media selections, and at the same time has his own personal choices.
His "a mountain" Lu Xun occupies the most space. He is a character who "will survive after death", and his literary influence extends to the contemporary masterpieces "White Deer Plain" and "To Live".
Xu Zidong emphasized the length of Lu Ling's "Children of the Rich Man", which has always been rarely discussed, and Zhao Shuli's "Little Erhei Marriage" also has new views.
Looking back on a century of novels, Xu Zidong realized that the four traditions represented by the four great books of the Ming Dynasty echoed in contemporary works, and concluded that the 20th century Chinese novels and ancient Chinese novels are in the same line.
Xu Zidong feels that this book has a "small breakthrough".
Different schools of academia formed tit-for-tat views on the relationship between the late Qing Dynasty and the May Fourth Movement. He pointed out the similarities, differences and correlations between the two, and explored why the "official novels" that prevailed in the late Qing Dynasty almost disappeared after the May Fourth Movement, but afterwards Again.
He concluded: The book strives to explore the complicated relationship between the Chinese non-commissioned officer and the civilian population over a century.
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