Abstract: Jean-François Millet, a French painter in the 19th century, was first introduced to China via New Youth (1919) as a representative of "Ibsenism". Millet was so influential in Chinese literary circles of the 1920s that he played a key role in the aesthetic enlightenment in parallel with the evolution of new literature. Millet's seeding in Chinese literary field witnessed the shifts from the "Renaissance" spiritual pursuit to the self-consciousness of the literary form, and from the construction of pure literature to the birth of artistic subjects in the late 1920s. During this process, Millet and the new literature formed a historical intertextual relationship between literature and fine arts, form and content, "cross street" and "ivory tower". Thus, the process of aesthetic enlightenment and the evolution of new literature together constituted a hidden thread of the 1920s.

Key words: 1920s, Millet, form, aesthetic enlightenment, realism