The new style schooling system in the early Republic of China continued to learn from Japan in the late Qing Dynasty, but various sources of influence from intellectual background and educational ideologies resulted in the complicated concept of literary study (wenxue). Although the pretertiary education, which comprised of primary school, junior high school and teacher training school, focused on the general education of the common people, the understanding of the concept “literary study” was varied in terms of its connation, nature and criteria for inclusion. The new educational system designated that the Chinese subject for pretertiary schools should aim at “cultivating interest in literary study (wenxue)”, but there were doubts about the pragmatic feasibility of literary study in national education when it was to be related with the study of the language. Hence a coursebook A History of Chinese Literature, primarily informed by Western learning, was developed but its method of compilation and selection of materials prompted great controversies. The issue behind the phenomenon involves the conceptualization of literary study as an educational discipline and how the study transforms over time in the context of new introduction of different intellectual resources since the 19th century.