中国新时期文学在改革开放的大潮中,以强劲的势头突破了"文化大革命"时期把文学作为政治工具的束缚,在文艺形式上进行了大胆的尝试。改革开放初期,以王蒙为代表的一批中年作家最早把西方现代主义文学的创作方法运用到现实主义文学的创作中,取得了一定的成绩。紧接着,刘索拉、徐星等青年作家以更新的创作形式引起了文坛的瞩目。从20世纪80年代末开始,随着后新潮小说的出现,形式主义浪潮开始对传统的现实主义创作方法进行全面的颠覆,他们提出的"原始态"、"零度情感"、"自然人"、"本能主义"、"陌生化"和"语言崇拜"等原则已经使文学创作从一个极端走向了另一个极端。

In the surging tide of reform and opening up, China's literature has broken with gathering momentum the fetters of the "Cultural Revolution", when literature was taken for a mere political instrument, and made bold attempts. In the early phase of reform and opening up, a number of middle-aged writers, led by Wang Meng, were the first to put the mode of writing of Western modernist literature into the creation of realistic literature and achieved certain success. Then some young writers such as Liu Suola and Xu Xing attracted the attention of the literary circle with their newer forms of creation. From the late 1980s, after the post-new trend novels appeared, a wave of formalism began to try to overturn completely the traditional realistic mode of writing. The principles they formulated, such as "primitive state", "zero-emotion", "natural man", "instinctism", "unfamiliarizing" and "language cult", caused literature creation to go from one extreme to the other.