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Title:: Northeastern Literature at the Historical Turning Point around1946: Focusing on the Creation of and Controversy over NortheasternLiterature

Author(s):: ZHANG Conghao; ZHANG Conghao, PhD in literature, is Professor and PhD Supervisor at College ofHumanities, Jilin University ( Changchun 130012 ).

Keywords:: northeastern literature; writers of the Puppet Manchuria; cultural transformation

Abstract:: After the recovery of the northeastern provinces in August 1945, a group of writers from theformer Puppet Manchuria set up the large-scale literary journal Northeastern Literature in Changchun andshowed great enthusiasm and desire to bid farewell to the old times, create new literature, build the Northeasternliterary world, and conduct self-salvation after the liberation. In this process, they summed up the“ richpast” or the“ limited past” , carried forward the“ northeastern consciousness” and“ creative inertia”, andshowed a“ self-purification tendency” and a feeling of“ personal crisis” . The works published in this journaland the controversies they aroused truly embody the turbulent history of the northeastern region which wascharacterized by cultural and literary transformations in the absence of dominant ideological orientation. Facingthe confused future and driven by their tenacious persistence, the writers from the former Puppet Manchuriatried to maintain their dominant position in the northeastern literary world. However, their complicated andunpleasant interaction with the reality suggests that they felt identity crisis and the pain of cultural separationand that the old cultural and literary era was coming to an end.