Engaged with the paradigms of cultural geography, local history, spatial politics, and everyday life, The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren unveils a Sichuan writer’s lifelong quest: an independent historical fiction writing project on Chengdu from the turn of the century through China’s 1911 Revolution. Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng's study illuminates the crisis of writing home in a globalized age by rescuing Li Jieren’s repeatedly revised but never finished river-novel series written from Republican to Communist China, struggling to liberate local memory from the national cum revolutionary currents. The book undercuts official historiography and rewrites Chinese literary history from the ground up by highlighting Li’s resilient geopoetics of writing that decenters the nation by adopting the place-based view of a distant province.
The Routledge Handbook of Revolutionary China covers the evolution of Chinese society from the roots of the Republic of China in the early 1900s until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The chapters in this volume explain aspects of the process of revolution and how people adapted to the demands of the revolutionary situation. Exploring changes in political leadership, as well as transformation in culture, it compares the differences in experiences in urban and rural areas and contrasts rapid changes, such as the war with Japan and Communist ‘liberation’ with evolutionary developments, such as the gradual redefinition of public space. Taking a comprehensive approach, the themes covered include: • War, occupation and liberation • Religion and gender • Education, cities and travel. This is an essential resource for students and scholars of Modern China, Republican China, Revolutionary China and Chinese Politics.
Why does 1919 deserve further study and debate a hundred years later? What lessons for global history may we learn from the world order created at the end of the Great War? Drawing insight from the global turn of the past several decades that has forced us to reconsider the most important world events and processes since the French Revolution and especially the growing interest in World War I as a global conflict that extended far beyond the borders of Europe, this volume explores the global political ramifications of the treaties prepared at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 by focusing on key topics: how the Paris Peace Conference re-shaped the geo-political configurations of the Middle East, the importance of transformations in Asia and particularly China in the immediate postwar period, the shifts in Southeastern Europe, new feminist movements in Central Europe, and the pre-history of neoliberalism. Read together, the papers demonstrate how the peace treaties signed in 1919 and 1920 marked a profound transformation on local, national, continental, and global scales.
The Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature presents a comprehensive overview of Chinese literature from the 1910s to the present day. Featuring detailed studies of selected masterpieces, it adopts a thematic-comparative approach. By developing an innovative conceptual framework predicated on a new theory of periodization, it thus situates Chinese literature in the context of world literature, and the forces of globalization. Each section consists of a series of contributions examining the major literary genres, including fiction, poetry, essay drama and film. Offering an exciting account of the century-long process of literary modernization in China, the handbook’s themes include: Modernization of people and writing Realism, rmanticism and mdernist asthetics Chinese literature on the stage and screen Patriotism, war and revolution Feminism, liberalism and socialism Literature of reform, reflection and experimentation Literature of Taiwan, Hong Kong and new media This handbook provides an integration of biographical narrative with textual analysis, maintaining a subtle balance between comprehensive overview and in-depth examination. As such, it is an essential reference guide for all students and scholars of Chinese literature.
Historical novels can be windows into other cultures and eras, but it's not always clear what's fact and what's fiction. Thousands have read Ba Jin's influential novel Family, but few realize how much he shaped his depiction of 1920s China to suit his story and his politics. In Fact in Fiction, Kristin Stapleton puts Ba Jin's bestseller into full historical context, both to illustrate how it successfully portrays human experiences during the 1920s and to reveal its historical distortions. Stapleton's attention to historical evidence and clear prose that directly addresses themes and characters from Family create a book that scholars, students, and general readers will enjoy. She focuses on Chengdu, China, Ba Jin's birthplace and the setting for Family, which was also a cultural and political center of western China. The city's richly preserved archives allow Stapleton to create an intimate portrait of a city that seemed far from the center of national politics of the day but clearly felt the forces of—and contributed to—the turbulent stream of Chinese history.
In various ways, Chinese diasporic communities seek to connect and re-connect with their “homelands” in literature, film, and visual culture. The essays in Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora examine how diasporic bodies and emotions interact with space and place, as well as how theories of affect change our thinking of diaspora. Questions of borders and border-crossing, not to mention the public and private spheres, in diaspora literature and film raise further questions about mapping and spatial representation and the affective and geographical significance of the push-and-pull movement in diasporic communities. The unique experience is represented differently by different authors across texts and media. In an age of globalization, in “the Chinese Century,” the spatial representation and cultural experiences of mobility, displacement, settlement, and hybridity become all the more urgent. The essays in this volume respond to this urgency, and they help to frame the study of Chinese diaspora and culture today.
In Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization, a variety of scholars explore the history, aesthetics, and politics of Chinese cinema as the Chinese film industry grapples with its place as the second largest film industry in the world. Exploring the various ways that Chinese cinema engages with global politics, market forces, and film cultures, this edited volume places Chinese cinema against an array of contexts informing the contours of Chinese cinema today. The book also demonstrates that Chinese cinema in the global context is informed by the intersections and tensions found in Chinese and world politics, national and international co-productions, the local and global in representing Chineseness, and the lived experiences of social and political movements versus screened politics in Chinese film culture. This work is a pioneer investigation of the topic and will inspire future research by other scholars of film studies. “This edited volume offers a much-needed account of alternative ways of envisioning Chinese cinema in the special context of China and the world. Its vigorous theoretical framework, which puts emphasis on interactions in the context of China and the world, will complement and update publications in related areas.” —Yiu-Wai Chu, The University of Hong Kong; author of Main Melody Films: Hong Kong Directors in Mainland China “Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization offers a collection of studies of modern Chinese films and their global connections, with a contemporary emphasis. Its authors’ insightful analyses of films—famous, obscure, and new to the twenty-first-century screen—elucidate numerous contextual factors relevant for understanding the history and aesthetics of Chinese cinemas.” —Christopher Rea, The University of British Columbia; author of Chinese Film Classics, 1922–1949
The goal of this project is to locate the origins and development of modern thought in the United States and East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While a strong literature on post-war modernization exists, there is a gap in the pre-war origins and development of modern ideas. This book re-evaluates the influence of the United States on East Asia in the twentieth century and gives greater voice to East Asians in the construction of their own ideas of modernity.
This volume covers aspects of opera translation within the Western world and in Asia, as well as some of opera’s many travels between continents, countries, languages and cultures—and also between genres and media. The concept of ‘adaptation’ is a thread running through the sixteen contributions, which encompass a variety of composers, operas, periods and national traditions. Sung translation, libretto translation, surtitling, subtitling are discussed from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Exploration of aspects such as the relationship between language and music, multimodality, intertextuality, cultural and linguistic transfer, multilingualism, humour, identity and stereotype, political ideology, the translator’s voice and the role of the audience is driven by a shared motivation: a love of opera and of the beauty it has never ceased to provide through the centuries, and admiration for the people who write, compose, perform, direct, translate, or otherwise contribute to making the joy of opera a part of our lives.
The Latin American novel burst onto the international literary scene with the Boom era--led by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa--and has influenced writers throughout the world ever since. García Márquez and Vargas Llosa each received the Nobel Prize in literature, and many of the best-known contemporary novelists are inspired by the region's fiction. Indeed, magical realism, the style associated with García Márquez, has left a profound imprint on African American, African, Asian, Anglophone Caribbean, and Latinx writers. Furthermore, post-Boom literature continues to garner interest, from the novels of Roberto Bolaño to the works of César Aira and Chico Buarque, to those of younger novelists such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Alejandro Zambra, and Valeria Luiselli. Yet, for many readers, the Latin American novel is often read in a piecemeal manner delinked from the traditions, authors, and social contexts that help explain its evolution. The Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel draws literary, historical, and social connections so that readers will come away understanding this literature as a rich and compelling canon. In forty-five chapters by leading and innovative scholars, the Handbook provides a comprehensive introduction, helping readers to see the region's intrinsic heterogeneity--for only with a broader view can one fully appreciate García Márquez or Bolaño. This volume charts the literary tradition of the Latin American novel from its beginnings during colonial times, its development during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, and its flourishing from the 1960s onward. Furthermore, the Handbook explores the regions, representations of identity, narrative trends, and authors that make this literature so diverse and fascinating, reflecting on the Latin American novel's position in world literature.
