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The protagonist of this book is He Mengxia, a primary school teacher. He lived in the home of a distant relative, Cui Shi, and also served as a tutor of his family. Cui Shi has a widowed daughter-in-law, Bai Liying, who was born in a big family. Her son, Peng Lang, was learning from He Mengxia. He Mengxia and Bai Liying fell in love from admiration. However, this was a love that was doomed to be hopeless. Due to her frustration, Bai Liying introduced her sister-in-law Junqian to He Mengxia and forced them to marry by using "the scheme of grafting trees and removing flowers, and the scheme of replacing a plum with a dead peach". Bai Liying felt sorry for her dead husband. On one hand, she kil...
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The first English translation of one of the most authoritative and significant studies in the field of modern Chinese literature.
"This volume addresses cultural and literary transformation in the late Ming (1550–1644) and late Qing (1851–1911) eras. Although conventionally associated with a devastating sociopolitical crisis, each of these periods was also a time when Chinese culture was rejuvenated. Focusing on the twin themes of crisis and innovation, the seventeen chapters in this book aim to illuminate the late Ming and late Qing as eras of literary-cultural innovation during periods of imperial disintegration; to analyze linkages between the two periods and the radical heritage they bequeathed to the modern imagination; and to rethink the “premodernity” of the late Ming and late Qing in the context of the ...
Dealing with the central issue of style in literature, this groundbreaking study is a must for sinologists, but also for all students of comparative literature. Michel Hockx takes as a point of departure the observation that most writers of the Republican period adhered to a distinctly traditional practice of gathering in literary societies, while at the same time displaying a marked preference for publishing their works through the modern medium of the literary journal. The first part of the book analyses different types of societies and their journals. The case studies in part two convey the wider impact of literary collectives and journal publications on literary practice. Convincingly breaking with the 'May Fourth' paradigm, the author proposes a radically new way of understanding the relationship between New Literature and other styles of modern Chinese writing.
Everyone who has studied the upheavals of modern China knows that one of them has taken place in Chinese writing. Anyone who has read Chinese texts has also eventually pondered the possible significance of this upheaval for understanding the text, and vice versa. By analyzing formal features and speculating about their relevance to the construction of a modern Chinese culture, this book intends to show why the Chinese have come to write the way they do in this century. Drawing on linguistic and rhetorical descriptions of language in writing as features of style, the author reviews the innovations that have been introduced into modern Chinese prose from both Chinese and foreign sources. The s...
Rhythms, conceptual metaphors, and political language convey meanings of which Chinese speakers themselves may not be aware. Link’s Anatomy of Chinese contributes to the debate over whether language shapes thought or vice versa, and its comparison of English with Chinese lends support to theories that locate the origins of language in the brain.
For many in the west, "Shanghai" is the quintessence of East Asian modernity, whether imagined as glamorous and exciting, corrupt and impoverishing, or a complex synthesis of the good, the bad, and the ugly. How did "Shanghai" acquire this power? How did people across China and around the world decide that Shanghai was the place to be? Mediasphere Shanghai shows that partial answers to these questions can be found in the products of Shanghai’s media industry, particularly the Shanghai novel, a distinctive genre of installment fiction that flourished from the 1890s to the 1930s. Shanghai fiction supplies not only the imagery that we now consider typical of the city, but, more significantly,...
After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the rise of a vernacular language movement, most scholars and writers declared the classical Chinese poetic tradition to be dead. But how could a longstanding high poetic form simply grind to a halt, even in the face of tumultuous social change? In this groundbreaking book, Shengqing Wu explores the transformation of Chinese classical-style poetry in the early twentieth century. Drawing on extensive archival research into the poetry collections and literary journals of two generations of poets and critics, Wu discusses the continuing significance of the classical form with its densely allusive and intricately wrought style. She combines clos...