ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights various aspects of that literary field, and the way in which it developed after the new literature had entered into it. With the gradual fading away of classical writing as a form of production, that sub-field quickly grew to become the dominant half of a literary field with a ‘dualistic structure’. Literary talent changed from being a form of cultural capital, convertible in many fields into political and other forms of power, to being a form of symbolic capital, of value within the field of literature only. Concentrating on the sub-field of high literature, the following agents deserve attention: the writer, the editor and the publisher. One of the most successful and influential people in the literary field of the 1920s whose main occupation was editing was Zheng Zhenduo. Modern Chinese literary practice in the 1920s, but also in later decades, is characterised by collectivity.
