You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until it became identifiable with history itself. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese—often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude—this book places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers modern Chinese history as a complex of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and personal articulations of bygone and ongoing events. His discussion ranges from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of hunger and starvation to the technology of crime and punishment.
In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations.
This pioneering study explores the role of working-class militias as vanguard and guardian of the Chinese Revolution. The book begins with the origins of urban militias in the late nineteenth century and follows their development to the present day. Elizabeth J. Perry focuses on the institution of worker militias as a vehicle for analyzing the changing (yet enduring) impact of China's revolutionary heritage on subsequent state-society relations. She also incorporates a strong comparative perspective, examining the influence of revolutionary militias on the political trajectories of the United States, France, the Soviet Union, and Iran. Based on exhaustive archival research, the work raises fascinating questions about the construction of revolutionary citizenship; the distinctions among class, community, and creed; the open-ended character of revolutionary movements; and the path dependency of institutional change. All readers interested in deepening their understanding of the Chinese Revolution and in the nature of revolutionary change more generally will find this an invaluable contribution.
After the first chapter, which deals with the theoretical issues, ensuing chapters treat particular instances of translingual practice such as national character, individualism, stylistic innovations, first-person narration, and canon formation
This book systematically studies the literary output of female writers in contemporary China within the frame of literary theories of feminism. With tools from psychoanalysis, structuralism and deconstructionism, the two female authors, Meng and Dai, analyze 9 important female writers from 1919 to 1949, including Yin Lu, Xin Bing, Ning Ding, Ailing Zhang. By decade, the authors provide a comprehensive depiction of these female writers' historic-cultural background as well as their reception by critics and audiences. Navigating the complex relation between mainstream literary trends and female writers’ practice, this text represents a landmark of practice of literary feminist criticism within the Chinese language.
In the aftermath of the May Fourth movement, a growing expectation of revolution raised important intellectual issues about the position of the individual within a society in turmoil and the shifting boundaries of political and sexual identities. The theme of "revolution plus love," a literary response to the widespread insurrections and upheaval, was first popularized in the late 1920s. In her examination of this popular but understudied literary formula, Liu Jianmei argues that revolution and love are culturally variable entities, their interplay a complex and constantly changing literary practice that is socially and historically determined. Liu looks at the formulary writing of "revoluti...
Modern Chinese literature has been flourishing for over a century, with varying degrees of intensity and energy at different junctures of history and points of locale. An integral part of world literature from the moment it was born, it has been in constant dialogue with its counterparts from the rest of the world. As it has been challenged and enriched by external influences, it has contributed to the wealth of literary culture of the entire world. In terms of themes and styles, modern Chinese literature is rich and varied; from the revolutionary to the pastoral, from romanticism to feminism, from modernism to post-modernism, critical realism, psychological realism, socialist realism, and m...