ABSTRACT
Born through the iconoclastic New Culture (May Fourth) Movement of the 1910s and 1920s, modern Chinese literature appears to be a radical antithesis to China’s classical tradition. The genre of the historical play, by its creative evocation of the past, nonetheless foregrounds the ambiguous intersections across the tradition-modern divide. The two authors at the center of this chapter, Guo Moruo (1892–1978) and Tian Han (1898–1962), are both founding figures of the historical play in modern Chinese literature. As two literary stars from the New Culture Movement, they lived through the violent vicissitudes of twentieth-century Chinese history, and were deeply involved in the country’s major political events. This chapter addresses their historical plays as indicators of forgotten or masked linkages between China’s literary past and present. In particular, it highlights the significance of what I call “lyrical Confucianism” to Guo’s and Tian’s historical plays. Through reinventing the traditional legacy of lyrical Confucianism, Guo’s and Tian’s plays dramatize the past into a rich figure of both the Chinese revolution and the limits of the revolution. An understanding of the hybridization of the past and the present in their works is thus essential for reading the historical play as a distinctive genre in modern Chinese literature.
