Abstract
The official policy of “popular education” during the early Republican period produced a significant impact on the landscape of fiction, particularly historical fiction. Some novelists contributed to “popular education” by writing extensive historical fiction, striving to avoid “absurdity and wickedness” for the sake of “popular education”. Influenced by the cultural perception of fiction, these authors also tended to prioritize reality over imagination in their narratives. They intended to “borrow the genre of fiction to write about the contemporary situation”; in their novels, they sought to “instill common legal knowledge in the general citizenry,” criticize such social ills as foot-binding and opium smoking, or implement political enlightenment. This method imbued their works with a distinct character of the era. Historical fiction writers of the early Republican period emphasized the role of fiction in popular education and relied on the official history. Under the influence of a strong sense of their readership, they constructed the textual form of fiction, which resulted in an obvious lack of artistic “flavor”. To accurately understand the creative features of historical fiction from this period, it must be viewed as a product of the specific cultural policy of “popular education”.
Keywords
popular education, historical fiction of the early Republican period, creative features
First Page
96
Last Page
106
Recommended Citation
Chen, Caixun. . "Historical Fiction of the Early Republican Period as a Carrier of Popular Education." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 45, (4): pp.96-106. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol45/iss4/10
