An Outline of the Construction of National Forms and World Visions in Contemporary Chinese Literature

This article attempts to re-examine the transformation of contemporary Chinese literature from the 1940s to the 1980s and its basic ways of shaping national forms in the context of a historical world conjuncture. By redefining the four basic concepts, contemporary literature, literariness, national form, and world (literature), this article views contemporary Chinese literature as a form of self-expression practice in contemporary China. Based on the different contexts and periods, such as the construction of Chinese socialist culture during the Cold War, the shaping of subjectivity in Third World countries and the reform and opening up, the article describes contemporary Chinese literature in 1940s to 1980s from five units, nationalization, Sovietization, Chinalization, Third Worldization and Westernization, and outlines the main characteristics of the construction of national forms in each unit from the perspective of dominant literary norms and literary practices. The reconstruction of the literary landscape based on the contemporaneity attempts to break the previous established stereotypes and frameworks, presenting the concrete ways in which contemporary Chinese literature shapes the cultural subjectivity in the dialectical relationship between historicity and praxis, and thus provides historical reference for thinking about Chinese literary issues in the 21st century.