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The Image of Youth and Age in Chinese Communist Literature*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Hellmut Wilhelm
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Extract

Speaking in a very general way, youth and age have been taken in traditional Chinese literature as two stages in a continuous development of which the first represents the preparation and the last the goal. Respective values attached to these stages were derived from this concept. In a civilisation where literature, even polite literature, was to a large extent an amateurish pursuit of the scholar-official, this evaluation does not come as a surprise, particularly since it will not be easy to find another civilisation which was as strongly ideology-motivated as was the Chinese. Established attitudes concerning youth and age were thus, in general, accepted and taken for granted also by the poet.

Type
Special Survey of Chinese Communist Literature
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 13 , March 1963 , pp. 180 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1963

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References

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11 Actually not so very old either. Hu Shin was 26 in 1917, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, the oldest among them, 38.

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