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The division between the scholar-gentry class and the “people” was an enduring theme of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic state. Twentieth-century elites recast this as a division between intellectuals and peasants and made the confrontation between the writing/intellectual self and the peasant “other” a central concern of literature. The author argues that, in the process, they created the “peasantry,” the downtrodden rural masses represented as proper objects of political action and shifting ideological agendas. Throughout this transition, language or discourse has been not only a weapon of struggle but the center of controversy and contention. Because of this prima...
This volume gathers personal reflections on life and literature by 44 of China's leading authors. It aims to illustrate how Chinese society and its creative writing have supported, competed and fought with each other for the past 40 years and more. Much of what is revealed here is mundane, but the pressure of bringing art to social and political causes, indeed the universal pressure to survive, forges this collection into a very human document. The strengths and weaknesses of these essays offer a window on those of modern Chinese literature itself. Realism was the favoured literary doctrine of the day, and, reflecting this, most of these essays speak for themselves - about war, revolution, betrayal and commitment.
Thirteen selected papers from an international conference on contemporary Chinese literature held near Gunzburg, Bavaria, in June-July 1986 constitute both a record of literary writings from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as well as an overview of the broader international role of Chinese writing in translation.
Stephen Owen is James Bryant Conant Professor of Chinese at Harvard University. --Book Jacket.
An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works. For over four thousand years, writers have been experimenting with what cognitive scientists call “mindreading”: constantly devising new social contexts for making their audiences imagine complex mental states of characters and narrators. In The Secret Life of Literature, Lisa Zunshine uncovers these mindreading patterns, which have, until now, remained invisible to both readers and critics, in works ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Invisible Man. Bringing together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary stud...
DIVExplores the origins of Chinese reportage (journalism) in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and develops an understanding of the aesthetics that governed the creation of this literature./div
Chinese literature has been the slave of politics at least since 1948 and especially during the Cultural Revolution. So repressed and convoluted is most Chinese literature that the West cannot read it as literature at all but rather as sociological and political texts. Professor Duke believes this has changed enough since 1977 to permit genuine literary analysis. This book surveys and analyzes the most important literary events in the PRC from 1977 to 1982. Chapter I covers the significant changes in the Chinese Party line on literature and art during this period and thus provides the backdrop for literary and artistic endeavor. Subsequent chapters deal with the critique of Chinese literature by China's own writers, the neo-realistic fiction of 1979-80, the nonfiction works of a courageous investigative reporter for the People's Daily, and the theme of humanism and its treatment in the works of Bai Hua and Dai Houying. The final chapter discusses the post-Mao generation of young writers, who are trying to create works that go beyond narrowly ideological boundaries of the past and reach toward a true modern Chinese literature.
This book provides a concise introduction to the intellectual trends in contemporary Chinese literature from the 1950s to the 1990s and the influence of overseas Sinology. The turbulent period of the second half of the 20th century in China witnessed a significant societal shift from a revolutionary to an economic focus. This transformation introduced and stimulated various ideas, reshaping public thought and reconstructing the historical landscape of contemporary Chinese literature. This book explores the response and self-exploration of domestic literary studies of the period, which were heavily influenced by the Western academic tradition and overseas Sinology studies. It examines critica...
In Composing for the Revolution: Nie Er and China’s Sonic Nationalism, Joshua Howard explores the role the songwriter Nie Er played in the 1930s proletarian arts movement and the process by which he became a nationalist icon. Composed only months before his untimely death in 1935, Nie Er’s last song, the “March of the Volunteers,” captured the rising anti-Japanese sentiment and was selected as China’s national anthem with the establishment of the People’s Republic. Nie was quickly canonized after his death and later recast into the “People’s Musician” during the 1950s, effectively becoming a national monument. Howard engages two historical paradigms that have dominated the ...
The martial arts novel is one of the most distinctive and widely-read forms of modern Chinese fiction. John Christopher Hamm offers the first in-depth English-language study of this fascinating and influential genre, focusing on the work of its undisputed twentieth-century master, Jin Yong.