关键词: 《围城》, 批评, 1946—1949年, 经典化, 自由主义

Abstract: The reception of Qian Zhongshu’s novel Fortress Besieged before 1949 was swayed by the leftist, centrist and the rightist perspectives. This paper investigates the critiques of Fortress Besieged from 1946 to 1949 and discusses its significance in the transition period between the modern and the contemporary Chinese literary history and in the process of its canonization. The centrists and the rightwing critics, from the perspective of liberalism, preliminarily summarized the merits and demerits of the novel but had not achieved high theoretically, while the leftwing critics approached the novel with criticism varied from radical censure to ingenious observations. The reception of this novel may be seen as an example of the confrontation between the liberalist views and the leftwing views in literary criticism during the moderncontemporary transition period, and it proved that the canonization of Fortress Besieged was the continuation of the liberal values of literature.

Key words: Fortress Besieged, criticism, 1946-1949, canonization, liberalism