关键词: 大众, 民族形式, 文化趣味, 小资产阶级, 文学形式, 抒情

Abstract: In the 1930s and 1940s, debates about “popular literature and art” and “the ‘national form’ of literature” emerged successively in China. While affirming the popular and national literary forms, the literary form that Chinese intellectuals highly admired served as the “Other” in the debating discourse and thus it has never received positive theoretical account. This article intends to re-present this literary form through an integrated examination of cultural interest, class, and literary form. Thanks to the promotion of the May Fourth New Literature, the radical attitude of petty bourgeois culture and the general conceptualization of enlightenment, this literary form is marked by the surge of lyrical elements. The new type of lyricism breaks various classical restrictions and embodies literature’s aesthetic approaches to “modernity.” However, can lyricism be incorporated into the tradition of epics? What does the psychological nature of lyricism bring to the narrative discourse? What is the gap between lyricism and a series of sociological ideas such as class, the masses, and social relations? What is the significance of modernist introspective fiction? These are some of the questions that need to be addressed in our theoretical investigation.

Key words: the masses, national form, cultural interest, petty bourgeoisie, literary form, lyricism