Abstract
The discussion on "peasant literature" among different parties and people around the 1930s was actually a continuation of the petty bourgeois issue in the 1920s Chinese revolution. This is because after the Communist-Kuomingtang spirit, the proletarian party could only reaffirm its political subjectivity when the petty bourgeoisie were distinguished from the peasants. Besides, Nonpartisan intellectuals also needed to highlight the unique significance of enlightening the more popular peasants, because they were different from the petty bourgeoisie, who, to a certain extent, was more directed at the intellectual class. However, the reception of theoretical resources from Soviet Russia and Japan inevitably features displacement and difference, due to internal contractions in the international communist movement and in the spread of Marxism. The theoretical interpretation of "peasant literature" thus became a political practice of inheriting and overcoming contradictions. Through a comparison of these immature and left-wing theories of peasant literature. it can be known that ideas on lass, revolution and popularization were either artistic representation of different parties achieving specific political goals and functions, or native-soil folk imagination of realizing self-enlightenment and national self-determination against mainstream authoritative discourse. This made the discussion on theories of "peasant literature" around the 1930s a political polyphony and a folk carnival. It fully demonstrated the complex and interactive relationship between politics and literature and within literature itself where different aesthetic tendencies mutually stimulates and generated each other.
First Page
84
Last Page
94
Recommended Citation
Feng, Bo. 2020. "Political Polyphony and Folk Carnival: Historical Symptoms of the Theory of Peasant Literature in the 1930s." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 40, (3): pp.84-94. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol40/iss3/15
