The last two decades have revealed new significance in the late Qing fiction in the transformation of Chinese literature, which has convincingly challenged the long-held discourse that a group of writers associated with the May Fourth New Literature Movement in the late 1910s fundamentally broke with the literary tradition and became the forerunners of modern Chinese literature. This article studies the short stories published in the popular literary magazine Yueyue xiaoshuo (also known as All-Story Monthly, 1906–9) and finds out that the narrative approaches adopted in the short stories are diverse and experimental, breaking from the preceding customs. While examining the narrative approaches in the short stories, this paper focuses on the aspect of focalization. Adopting the idea of focalization mode as an observatory point is particularly useful for discussing short stories in All-Story Monthly, because the diversified and flexible arrangement of observatory positions and the selection of the narrative information (such as a character’s appearance, action, and speech) to be presented are exactly crucial aspects in which the short stories display marked innovation or modification of the traditional narrative modes.
Since modern Singapore was founded in 1819, different generations of Chinese immigrants have come to live there. The intellectuals among them established literary societies and composed classical Chinese poetry. Different generations of poets wrote about Singapore in different ways. Sojourner poets wrote about Nanyang (a Chinese word referring to Southeast Asia in general, and Malaya and Singapore in particular) as a foreign land; their poetry reflected a strong sense of homesickness. In contrast, the naturalized first-generation and localized poets considered Nanyang their native land; their poetry focused more on Singaporean stories and experiences. Classical Chinese poetry by Chinese immigrants in Singapore, thus, has its own characteristics even as it draws on the essence of Chinese cultural tradition.
In the modern Chinese literary scene, Lin Huiyin (1904–55) was a prominent woman writer who applied free indirect discourse (FID), a “new” narrative device, into her creative writing. In some of her works, FID is not only a new way in which to realize a modern narrative style but also a discreet way to provide her own voice. The existence of slippage between the narrator and character-focalizer deliberately destabilizes the reader, somehow swaying between the narrator’s authoritative and the character’s initial characteristics. In this way, this narrative strategy allows Lin to establish a kind of private space for herself within which to query authority, thereby escaping the material world dominated by male writers at that time. For instance, in her well-known short story, “In Ninety-Nine Degrees of Heat” (Jiushijiu du zhong), Lin Huiyin employed this typical narrative strategy, illustrating the modernity of her creative writing and revealing some meanings of social and gendered narratives.
Unlike Hu Shih and Chen Duxiu, among other leading intellectuals in the May Fourth New Literature Movement, Lu Xun had no experience of writing in vernacular Chinese (baihua) in his early years. Except Jules Verne’s two novels translated by Lu Xun in the 1900s, all his translations and writings before 1918 were produced in classical Chinese (wenyan), until “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji) was published in May 1918. Despite the well-known fact that Lu Xun wrote his first vernacular fiction at the quest of Qian Xuantong, the sudden and seemingly effortless change in Lu Xun’s linguistic choice remains a mystery. This article attempts to shed new light on the problem by focusing on Lu Xun’s understanding and practice of voices (sheng) in his early works. First, I explore the meaning of the term “voices of the heart” (xinsheng) in Lu Xun’s thoughts and connect it to the rendering of subjectivity in his writings and translations in the late Qing dynasty. The archaic style he chose implies, paradoxically, both his effort to deliver inner “voices of the heart” and his self-awareness of the difficulty in conveying it. Then along this line, I try to grasp Lu Xun’s intrinsic motivation for the change in his linguistic choice. Vernacular Chinese provided Lu Xun with a channel of constructing inter-subjectivity by appealing to a broad public, thus emancipating him from the dilemma of expressing “voices of the heart.” Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, Lu Xun’s perception and application of written language were closely interwoven with his concern for subjectivity.