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1 results

  • 11 - Literature under communism

  • from PART IV - LIFE AND LETTERS UNDER COMMUNISM
  • Edited by Roderick MacFarquhar, Harvard University, Massachusetts, John K. Fairbank, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of China
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    29 November 1991, pp 743-812

  • Summary

    During China's past three decades, literature under communism has stocked the cultural desert of the Chinese countryside with nourishment of a kind. It has provided heroes, role models, lessons in practical socialism. A number of established poets who had spent the war and postwar years in the Kuomintang-controlled areas of China made attempts, following the establishment of the People's Republic, to bring their work into accord with the new spirit of the age. By an irony of history, precisely the years during which literary creation was most rigidly fettered on the mainland were a time of the most vigorous new activity in Taiwan. The death of Mao and the overthrow of the Gang of Four opened the floodgates to literary creation in all genres. One of the themes of post-Mao writing was the private values of personal life. The proper place of love in socialist life, the damage done by love's denial.