Paper sorrow

The lyrical, the romantic, and the sentimental as the literary paradigms cover different genres and historical periods of Chinese literature. The present study explores the phenomenon of "feeling" in Chinese literature from the 1840s to the 1920s, ranging the late Qing, early Republican, and May Fourth periods. The time span as a critical juncture of the emergence of modern Chinese literature concerns the linguistic, generic, and intellectual conception of modern Chinese literature. In the present study, however, the contrast of poetry and prose exceeds the generic definition, and the "doom" of classical lyricism concerns not only tradition and modernity, but also memory and imagination in immanent experience of history. The common knowledge of history of modern Chinese literature often ushers in the grand discourses of nation and revolution to coordinate with history of modern China. Not rarely it unwittingly works as a "reflectionist" drive in the critical circle. The other bundle of terms, especially individualism and subjectivity, also functions in a "reductionist" manner to confirm "literary modernity." In attempt to sidestep the two routes, the present study takes the intimate lens of "feeling" to attend to the relational issue on language and consciousness as fundamental to recover the innate binding of literature and experience, which converse with the exigent and urgent context of history of modern China more subtly than politics and ideology can register.