Fiction of Yang Mo and Ouyang Shan

In the spring of 1958, the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong stressed in his two talks on literature and art that “proletarian literature and art ought to adopt the creative methods of the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism.” ¹ Since then, the slogan of “revolutionary realism plus revolutionary romanticism” had become the supreme guideline for literary creation and criticism during the Maoist period (1949–1976). ² It must be pointed out that in this new tenet for artistic creation, revolutionary romanticism is more valued than revolutionary realism, which, to some critics, marks a slight departure from socialist realism that was borrowed from the Soviet Union. Under this new official guideline, the ideological function of literature has been made more prominent in the following two ways. First, it lays emphasis on the Marxist world outlook, particularly its interpretation of the advancement of the society from the lower stages of feudalism and capitalism to the higher stages of socialism and communism, with class struggle as the driving force of this social transformation. In artistic practice, the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism means “a combination of socialist reality and communist ideal, which requires authors to see communist seeds and elements through socialist reality.” ³ Second, it attaches importance to creating idealized characters, particularly revolutionary heroes. A basic task of socialist literature is to construct grand historical narratives, so as to show the revolutionary identity of the nation state and to construct a historical course progressing to a new stage that transcends all previous historical periods and prefigures a new historical era. In this historical construction, an effective approach is to tell the stories of the personal growth of intellectuals. ⁴