Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China 1911-1937

Dealing with the central issue of style in literature, this groundbreaking study is a must for sinologists, but also for all students of comparative literature.
Michel Hockx takes as a point of departure the observation that most writers of the Republican period adhered to a distinctly traditional practice of gathering in literary societies, while at the same time displaying a marked preference for publishing their works through the modern medium of the literary journal.
The first part of the book analyses different types of societies and their journals. The case studies in part two convey the wider impact of literary collectives and journal publications on literary practice.
Convincingly breaking with the ’May Fourth’ paradigm, the author proposes a radically new way of understanding the relationship between New Literature and other styles of modern Chinese writing.

Michel Hockx, Ph.D. (1994) at Leiden University, is Professor of Chinese at SOAS, University of London. He has published extensively on modern Chinese poetry and on the sociology of modern Chinese literature.