SOURCE: “The Twentieth Century,” in An Introduction to Vietnamese Literature, translated from the French by D. M. Hawke, Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 107–155

In the following essay, which is a revised version of an essay originally published in French in 1969, Durand and Huan outline the history of Vietnamese literature.

It is no exaggeration to say that in the period 1900–1975 Vietnamese literature reached heights unequalled in all its history. This flowering was no doubt due to a combination of factors—political, economic and social; but the most important single cause was the introduction of quoc-ngu (the system of writing literary and colloquial Vietnamese in the Roman alphabet). It slowly but surely superseded the nôm system of transliteration in Chinese characters, which had always been cumbrous to use—indeed, it was not officially recognized by the majority of emperors. But if quoc-ngu ushered in a new era in Vietnamese literature...