Prefiguring Modernism: Social Changes and Narrative Experimentation in Late Imperial Chinese Novels

ABSTRACT

Conventional scholarship has long identified the late Qing period as the starting point of Chinese modernity, associating its emergence with the intellectual reforms of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao and the dissemination of Western ideas through translated texts. This article challenges this preconception and argues that elements of Chinese modernism were in fact already present during the late Ming period, most prominently in contemporaneous Chinese fiction written in both the vernacular and classical prose. By focusing on these texts' attention to the subjective and psychological experience, as well as their experimental narrative forms, an argument will be made regarding the indigenous genealogy that situates Chinese modernism within the longer trajectory of China's own literary and cultural transformations versus its 20th‐century encounters with Western literary models. In doing so, this paper hopes to contribute to ongoing academic discussions on the historical and cultural coordinates of global modernism with a more plural and decentered understanding.