A Century of Echoes: Zhang Henshui’s Popular Literature Paradigm and the Construction of Popular Literature and Art in the Digital Age
In the history of modern Chinese literature, Zhang Henshui’s practice of popular literature was long obscured by the enlightenment narrative of New Literature, yet a century later it has permeated widely through the waves of digital media and AIGC-driven content creation, becoming an integral part of the internal cultural logic of contemporary popular literature and art. This paper argues that Zhang Henshui’s “romance-plus-society” mode of affective narration, his path of modernizing the traditional chapter-based novel, together with the media-interactive thinking and affect-driven writing developed over his career in journalism, constitute a popular literature paradigm of complete methodological value. Through cross-media content translation, this paradigm has extended from newspaper serialization to online serialization, algorithmic distribution, and AI-generated content, profoundly shaping the production mechanisms of contemporary popular literature and art. The paper further excavates the practical experience of modernizing this indigenous tradition, explains the internal dynamics of its reactivation in the digital media environment, and rationally analyzes the crisis of spiritual hollowing-out that the paradigm faces under algorithmic logic and AIGC mass production. The paper ultimately contends that for contemporary popular literature and art to achieve refined and deepened development, it must return to the human affect and real-world observation in Zhang Henshui’s writing that cannot be quantified by data, and rebuild an indigenous paradigm of popular writing imbued with the warmth of life by balancing technological tools and humanistic expression.
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