As the predecessor of misty poetry, Baiyangdian Poetry School not only marks the birth of China's contemporary enlightenment literary trend of thought, but also can be regarded as the real beginning of the whole avant-garde literary trend of thought. Later misty poems, stream-of-consciousness novels and root-seeking literature all showed the development of avant-garde literature. This development process obviously shows the development from enlightenment to modernism.
Specifically, before the avant-garde novel really attracted the attention of the literary world, its appearance was prepared: this novel appeared a little later than the root-seeking novel, represented by Liu Suola, Xu Xing and Wang Shuo. They show a betrayal of real life and the concept of life, without the sense of sacredness and solemnity in the cultural criticism of root-seeking writers, and without the sense of mission and responsibility in the cultural construction of root-seeking writers. On the contrary, some of them have blasphemous enthusiasm for sacredness, belief and sublimity, and they are the norms and norms of existing life. They treat life with a game attitude. They are a group of life players, smashing the complete life image we have established. In fact, after the cultural criticism of root-seeking novels, they finished their criticism of the concept of existence.
On this basis, avant-garde novels have formed a magnificent wave.
Avant-garde novel is a literary phenomenon in the specific historical and cultural context of China. Its creators are mainly a group of young writers who were born in the late 1950s and early 1960s with high academic qualifications and literary attainments. Influenced by the works of many different western writers from modernism to post-modernism, they are dissatisfied with the long-standing fixed mode and outdated skills of China literature, and try to completely change the face of China's novels through the exploration and experiment of novel forms, so as to realize their literary ambition of going global.
In the mid-1980s, the emphasis on literary style gradually got rid of the limitations of literary themes, themes and the content categories expressed by mainstream discourse. With the emergence of avant-garde novelists, novel creation presents a brand-new formal aesthetic state. Literary discourse has greatly broken through the narrative and descriptive functions of traditional literary language, created new emotional expression and metaphorical symbolic functions, and impacted the traditional realistic literary concept.
Contemporary novels really have modern character-novels that really break away from the traditional literary concept of "taking Tao as literature" are the creations of Ma Yuan, Hong Feng and others after they became avant-garde writers. On the basis of "cultural roots" and "modernist" novels, avant-garde novels have gained the pillars of their own development, and gained their own subjectivity and autonomy under this framework, thus making China's contemporary novels finally independent of various constraints of politics, sociology, history and culturology. The formal revolution carried out by avant-garde novelists represented by Ma Yuan is undoubtedly of epoch-making significance. They put forward a strong challenge to the traditional aesthetic experience and literary concept, which means the final completion of the historic turning point of China's modernist literature.