The Syntactic Style of Cultural Revolution Literature

This paper investigates the language of official literature produced during the Cultural Revolution (CR), concentrating on linguo-stylistic characteristics of sentences, relating to length, rhyming, parallelism, quotation and grammaticality. By demonstrating the intended syntactic features, it aims to explore the language’s aesthetic and stylistic characteristics and functions. A comparative perspective is made of the CR literary language with that of pre-CR and post-CR literature.