ABSTRACT
Of all modern Chinese writers, perhaps Mao Dun (pen name of Shen Yanbing, 1896–1981) was most heavily invested in the bringing of Western ideas about literature, and particularly about the novel, to China. Born into a highly educated although somewhat down at heel family in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province – just outside Shanghai – in 1896, he was able to attend the Beijing University Preparatory School in that city for two years beginning in 1914. Forced to withdraw owing to financial difficulties, he secured employment in 1916, at the tender age of 20, at the Shanghai Commercial Press, China’s largest publishing enterprise and probably the leading intellectual institution in the country at the time, even though it had only been founded twenty years earlier. Beginning in the English Correspondence Division, he quickly moved on to take on greater editorial and translating responsibilities, eventually in 1920 assuming responsibility for the revamping of one of the Press’s most important publications, Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao). This renovation entailed changing the journal from being an eclectic collection of various sorts of fiction to a specific focus on publishing the work of the “new literature” being written in response to the reform entreaties emanating from the “New Culture Movement” springing from the “May Fourth” movement that had begun at Peking University in 1919. At the center of this effort was extensive attention paid to Western literary theory, generally centering around notions of literary realism. At the same time Mao Dun was invited to join the new “Society for Literary Research,” a group originating in Beijing devoted to the new literature, of which Mao Dun was initially the only member from Shanghai. Within a short time, the revamped Fiction Monthly had become closely associated with the Society, so much so that it was often assumed to be its official organ. During this entire period Mao Dun continued to write a great many critical articles for the magazine, mostly introducing modern Western ideas about literature.
