Like their predecessors, many late Qing critics continued to place emotion at the center of their discussions of literary creation. Their views, however, were now forged in a radically different cultural context, marked by the onslaught of Western science and technologies, ideas and values; the Qing court's inability to embark on a meaningful program of modernization; and, above all, successive military defeats and territorial concessions to Western powers. As Chinese civilization faced existential threat, some late Qing scholars began to theorize literary creation in terms of how it could help reverse the course of China's rapidly accelerating decline. To many, literary creation could effect this salvation only if driven by new kinds of powerful emotion. Among proponents of this new thinking about emotion and literary creation, the most prominent are the reform-minded Gong Zizhen 龔自珍 (1792–1841) and the revolutionary Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936). This chapter examines their theoretical work in...
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