Abstract: The concept of Wenti, which refers to the “literary entity” in ancient Chinese, has experienced semantic transformation twice, whose meaning has transformed from “literary entity” to the symbol of linguistic form in the context of Japanese culture since the 17th century. From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the views of stylistics from, taking “language form” as its essential connotation, was introduced to China. Such introduction conformed the overall cultural current of the reform movement of modern Chinese literature, which also targeted at language revolution. Dually influenced by the views of stylistics from Japan and the concept of western genology and stylistics, modern Chinese academia interpreted Wenti, referring to genre based on the tradition, as the general form of literary works. Meanwhile, they kept translating “style” to Wenti in order to express relative language forms of thoughts and emotions in an article. Compared to western view of “style” , referring to the language forms with different characteristics, the multistaged realization of the connotation of literary style intensively mirrored various demand of the different developing stages of modern Chinese literature. At the initial stage of vernacular development, the focus of the basic emotional function of literary style highlighted the connotation of “language forms”; within the maturity of modern literature, the demand of expressing the author's personality emerged beyond the foundation of emotional expression. Thereforth, the author's personality expressed through the form of language consist the other connotation of literary style, which started to catch conscious attention of authors and critics. Only by knowing such transformation of modern Chinese stylistic conception can we pave a brand new way for the research on the history of modern Chinese literature.

Key words: the conception of ancient Chinese literary entities, modern Japanese stylistic conception, modern Chinese stylistic conception, genology, language form, personality, Liang Qichao