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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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 Monster That Is History
The Monster That Is History

Author: Dewei Wang

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-10-04

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0520238737

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. 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.

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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"... 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.

Milestones on a Golden Road
Milestones on a Golden Road

Author: Richard King

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2013-01-15

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0774823747

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Milestones on a Golden Road, Richard King discusses pivotal works of fiction published under the watchful eye of China’s Communist regime between 1945 and 1980. Addressing questions of literary production, King looks at how writers dealt with shifting ideological demands, what indigenous and imported traditions inspired them, and how they were able to depict a utopian Communist future to their readers, as the present took a very different turn. Early “red classics” were followed by works featuring increasingly lurid images of joyful socialism, and later by fiction exposing the Mao era as an age of irrationality, arbitrary rule, and suffering – a Golden Road that had led to nowhere.

Becoming Chinese
Becoming Chinese

Author: Wen-hsin Yeh

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 052092441X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume evaluates the dual roles of war and modernity in the transformation of twentieth-century Chinese identity. The contributors, all leading researchers, argue that war, no less than revolution, deserves attention as a major force in the making of twentieth-century Chinese history. Further, they show that modernity in material culture and changes in intellectual consciousness should serve as twin foci of a new wave of scholarly analysis. Examining in particular the rise of modern Chinese cities and the making of the Chinese nation-state, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume of cultural history provide new ways of thinking about China's modern transformation up to the 1950s. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that the combined effect of a modernizing state and an industrializing economy weakened the Chinese bourgeoisie and undercut the individual's quest for autonomy. Drawing upon new archival sources, these theoretically informed, thoroughly revisionist essays focus on topics such as Western-inspired modernity, urban cosmopolitanism, consumer culture, gender relationships, interchanges between city and countryside, and the growing impact of the state on the lives of individuals. The volume makes an important contribution toward a postsocialist understanding of twentieth-century China.