Abstract
Qian Xuantong borrowed and transformed Zhang Taiyan's resources of literary language when he joined the camp of the May Fourth literary revolution. On the one hand, he was against the use of allusion, advocated modern language, and opposed rhythmical proses featured parallelism and flowery language, targeting specifically at "evil of the study of Anthology and fallacy of Tongcheng School prose". On the other hand, he established the theoretical bases for the "unity of spoken and written languages" and "verbosity" in vernacular Chinese, using the methodology of "misuse of words" to respond to contemporary queries about May Fourth vernacular Chinese. Qian Xuantong's introduction of Zhang Taiyan's resources of literary language provided concrete orientation and historical support for the May Fourth literary revolution. With regard to difference of their views of literary language, while the core and main body of Zhang Taiyan's view of literary language were philology and classical Chinese, Qian Xuantong considered vernacular as the orthodoxy of literature. Moreover, Qian advocated the abolition of classical Chinese from the perspective of evolution, and emphasized the absolute correctness and independence of vernacular Chinese.
First Page
144
Last Page
155
Recommended Citation
Wang, Xiaohui. 2020. "Zhang Taiyan's View of Literary Language and Qian Xuantong's "May Fourth" Literary Revolution." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 40, (5): pp.144-155. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol40/iss5/22
