ABSTRACT
The proliferation of online literary communities in Mainland China over the past few years has been staggering. Although some critics claim that the phenomenon of ‘web literature’ (wangluo wenxue) is already past its prime, the sheer volume of literary works that are being submitted, published and reviewed online in China on a daily basis is immense. Moreover, the vast majority of writers who produce these works are not known in print culture circles. This alone makes web literature worth studying, for instance by placing it in the context of ‘popular culture’. It is my impression, however, that by labelling these writings ‘popular’ one would misrep-resent the values and ambitions of the people involved, as well as the cultural significance of the phenomenon itself. Unlike popular literature in the normal sense of the word, Chinese web literature, despite the massive size of its communities and audiences, strives to participate in the production of serious, ‘high’ literature. It does not, or not entirely, take for granted the cultural superiority of critically acclaimed contemporary print culture writing. Moreover, its contents allow for the continuation of traditional Chinese writing styles and practices, which have been and still are emphatically excluded from the printed contemporary literary canon. In this article, I shall argue that Chinese web literature at the start of the twenty-first century represents the further development of a literary style pioneered in literary journals from the first decades of the twentieth century. Similar to those journals, literary websites employ the latest publishing technologies to foster and enhance the traditional function of literature as a social, as well as a cultural institution. The result is a mixed textual product, appealing to large numbers of readers yet elitist in orientation, that cannot be easily placed in any conceptual category.
