ABSTRACT
Well before the outbreak of fighting in 1937, the Japanese military aggression of the early 1930s prompted a number of Chinese writers to address war with Japan as a central social concern. At the same time, many other writers and artists were reluctant to follow any prescription that war should occupy the place of an obligatory theme for literature and art. These attitudes were carried over into the war period itself, bringing with them an array of divergent assumptions about the role of literature and art in society and the place of such features as popular, traditional, and regional styles and modern innovations. These attitudes and assumptions, together with political beliefs and varying types of censorship in different regions, were major collective determinants of how writers and artists constructed their images and accounts of suffering and aspirations during the war.
