The Monster That Is History
The Monster That Is History

Author: David Der-Wei Wang

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-10-04

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780520937246

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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.

Visual Culture in Contemporary China
Visual Culture in Contemporary China

Author: Xiaobing Tang

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-01-08

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1316033678

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Exploring a wealth of images ranging from woodblock prints to oil paintings, this beautifully illustrated full-color study takes up key elements of the visual culture produced in the People's Republic of China from its founding in 1949 to the present day. In a challenge to prevailing perceptions, Xiaobing Tang argues that contemporary Chinese visual culture is too complex to be understood in terms of a simple binary of government propaganda and dissident art, and that new ways must be sought to explain as well as appreciate its multiple sources and enduring visions. Drawing on rich artistic, literary, and sociopolitical backgrounds, Tang presents a series of insightful readings of paradigmatic works in contemporary Chinese visual arts and cinema. Lucidly written and organized to address provocative questions, this compelling study underscores the global and historical context of Chinese visual culture and offers a timely new perspective on our understanding of China today.

Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century
Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century

Author: Pang-Yuan Chi

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2000-09-22

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780253108364

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"... an important contribution to the study of recent Chinese literature." -- Choice "This fine, scholarly survey of Chinese literature since 1949... discusses such trends as modernism, nativism, realism, root-seeking and 'scar' literature, 'misty' poets, and political, feminist, and societal issues in modern Chinese literature." -- Library Journal This volume is a survey of modern Chinese literature in the second half of the twentieth century. It has three goals: (1) to introduce figures, works, movements, and debates that constitute the dynamics of Chinese literature from 1949 to the end of the century; (2) to depict the enunciative endeavors, ranging from ideological treatises to avant-garde experiments, that inform the polyphonic discourse of Chinese cultural politics; (3) to observe the historical factors that enacted the interplay of literary (post)modernities across the Chinese communities in the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas.

Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature
Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature

Author: Lin Jiang

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-06-07

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9819906660

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This edited collection of 14 essays presents the most enlightening research findings on Mo Yan and his novels. The authors of the contributions are renowned Chinese scholars and critics from Mainland China, Chinese Hong Kong, and Taiwan like Li Jingze, vice president of Chinese Writers Association, Guo Jie, doctoral supervisor and vice president of South China Normal University, Cheng Guangwei, professor and doctoral supervisor of Renmin University of China, etc. In the book, a large range of topics have been discussed and explored, such as Mo Yan and the Chinese spirit, the revelation of Mo Yan, hallucination and localization, and folkness in The Transparent Carrot, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, Red Sorghum Clan, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, The Republic of Wine, Sandalwood Death, and Frog. This collection provides English readers and researchers the opportunity to learn what Chinese scholars and critics have argued about Mo Yan's styles and themes, as well as his relationship to the long canon of Chinese literature. Such a collection with fluid and yet accurate translations, the first of its kind in English, brings to the Western world the Chinese sensibility and critical analysis of this living Chinese Nobel laureate and his novels.

Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature
Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature

Author: Li-hua Ying

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-11-15

Total Pages: 825

ISBN-13: 1538130068

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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 magical realism. Indeed, it encompasses a full range of ideological and aesthetic concerns. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature presents a broad perspective on the development and history of literature in modern China. It offers a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Chinese literature.