ABSTRACT
As we have seen in earlier chapters, revolutionary children's literature was Marxist or, at least, contained a social analysis which was influenced by Marxism. It projected values concerned with the pursuit of an egalitarian society. Hence this literature is aligned with left-wing politics in the revolutionary period and was instrumental in the Liberation effort. Until his death in 1936, Lu Xun was the major theorist for this emerging school. In the forties, Mao Zedong merged revolutionary literature, including that for children, with the war effort. Mao's famous 'Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art' in 1942 set the theoretical guidelines for all revolutionary art over the next three to four decades. All literature was to be an ideological weapon and the passive romanticism of the early May Fourth period gave way to an active romanticism and, finally, to heroic adventure stories in children's literature.
