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Revolution and Form
In Revolution and Form, Jianhua Chen offers a detailed analysis of several early works by Mao Dun, focusing in particular on their engagement with themes of modernity and revolution, gender and desire. One of the leading authors of the early twentieth century May Fourth period, Mao Dun had a complicated relationship with both the Communist Party and the women’s liberation movement, and his fictional works reflect these twin concerns with revolution and gender. Chen’s study examines Mao Dun’s early fiction in relationship to the biographical and historical conditions under which it was produced. Translated by Max Bohnenkamp, Todd Foley, FU Poshek, Nga Li LAM, LI Meng, and Carlos Rojas.
The Monster That Is History
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.
The Limits of Realism
Chinese intellectuals of the early twentieth century were attracted to realism primarily as a tool for social regeneration. Realism encouraged writers to adopt the stance of the independent cultural critic and drew into the compass of serious literature the disenfranchised "others" of Chinese society. As historical pressures forced new ideological commitments in the late twenties and thirties, however, writers grew suspicious both of the "individualism" implicit in the realist model and of the often superficial nature of the sympathies that their fiction evoked in the middle class. Anderson argues that realism must be defined negatively as a "discourse of limitations" and is of minimal utili...
Rulin waishi and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China
Rulin waishi (The Unofficial History of the Scholars) is more than a landmark in the history of the Chinese novel. This eighteenth-century work, which was deeply embedded in the intellectual and literary discourses of its time, challenges the reader to come to grips with the mid-Qing debates over ritual and ritualism, and the construction of history, narrative, and lyricism. Wu Jingzi’s (1701–54) ironic portrait of literati life was unprecedented in its comprehensive treatment of the degeneration of mores, the predicaments of official institutions, and the Confucian elite’s futile struggle to reassert moral and cultural authority. Like many of his fellow literati, Wu found the vernacul...
Words and Their Stories
As China joins the capitalist world economy, the problems of social disintegration that gave rise to the earlier revolutionary social movements are becoming pressing. Instead of viewing the Chinese Revolution as an academic study, these essays suggest that the motifs of the Revolution are still alive and relevant. The slogan “Farewell to Revolution” that obscures the revolutionary language is premature. In spite of dislocations and ruptures in the revolutionary language, to rethink this discourse is to revisit a history in terms of sedimented layers of linguistic meanings and political aspirations. Earlier meanings of revolutionary words may persist or coexist with non-revolutionary rivals. Recovery of the vital uses of key revolutionary words proffers critical alternatives in which contemporary capitalist myths can be contested.
A Time of Lost Gods
Traversing visible and invisible realms, A Time of Lost Gods attends to profound rereadings of politics, religion, and madness in the cosmic accounts of spirit mediumship. Drawing on research across a temple, a psychiatric unit, and the home altars of spirit mediums in a rural county of China’s Central Plain, it asks: What ghostly forms emerge after the death of Mao and the so-called end of history? The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told through its destruction under Mao and relative flourishing thereafter. Here, those who engage in mediumship offer a different history of the present. They approach Mao’s reign not simply as an earthly secu...
Developmental Fairy Tales
In 1992 Deng Xiaoping famously declared, “Development is the only hard imperative.” What ensued was the transformation of China from a socialist state to a capitalist market economy. The spirit of development has since become the prevailing creed of the People’s Republic, helping to bring about unprecedented modern prosperity, but also creating new forms of poverty, staggering social upheaval, physical dislocation, and environmental destruction. In Developmental Fairy Tales, Andrew F. Jones asserts that the groundwork for this recent transformation was laid in the late nineteenth century, with the translation of the evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, and Spencer into Chinese letter...
The Afterlife of Images
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