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Utopian Fiction In China
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Book Synopsis Perfect Worlds by : Douwe Wessel Fokkema
Download or read book Perfect Worlds written by Douwe Wessel Fokkema and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Perfect Worlds offers an extensive historical analysis of utopian narratives in the Chinese and Euro-American traditions. This comparative study discusses, among other things, More's criticism of Plato, the European orientalist search for utopia in China, Wells's Modern Utopia and his talk with Stalin, Chinese writers constructing their Confucianist utopia, traces of Daoism in Mao Zedong's utopianism and politics and finally the rise of dystopian writing - a negative expression of the utopian impulse - in Europe and America as well as in China"--P. 4 of cover.
Book Synopsis Perfect Worlds by : Douwe Wessel Fokkema
Download or read book Perfect Worlds written by Douwe Wessel Fokkema and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Perfect Worlds offers an extensive historical analysis of utopian narratives in the Chinese and Euro-American traditions. This comparative study discusses, among other things, More's criticism of Plato, the European orientalist search for utopia in China, Wells's Modern Utopia and his talk with Stalin, Chinese writers constructing their Confucianist utopia, traces of Daoism in Mao Zedong's utopianism and politics and finally the rise of dystopian writing - a negative expression of the utopian impulse - in Europe and America as well as in China"--P. 4 of cover.
Book Synopsis Utopian Fiction in China by : Shuk Man Leung
Download or read book Utopian Fiction in China written by Shuk Man Leung and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike previous studies that have examined the late Qing utopian imagination as an ahistorical motif, a literary theme, and a translation phenomenon, in this book Shuk Man Leung considers utopian fiction as a knowledge apparatus that helped develop Chinese nationalism and modernity. Based on untapped primary sources in Chinese, English, and Japanese, her research reveals how utopian imagination, blooming after Liang Qichao’s publication of The Future of New China, served as a tool of knowledge formation and dissemination that transformed China’s public sphere and catalysed historical change. Embracing interdisciplinary approach from genre studies, studies on modern Chinese newspapers and intellectual history, this book provides an analysis of the development of utopian literary practices, epistemic meanings, and fictional narratives and the interactions between traditional and imported knowledge that helped shape the discourse in early 20th century China.
Book Synopsis Hundred Days’ Literature by : Lorenzo Andolfatto
Download or read book Hundred Days’ Literature written by Lorenzo Andolfatto and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lorenzo Andolfatto’s Hundred Days’ Literature explores the literary landscape of late imperial China via the notion of utopia, offering a critical itinerary that moves from Liang Qichao’s fictional experiments to Wu Jianren’s modern retelling of the Story of the Stone.
Book Synopsis Utopian Fiction in China by : Shuk Man Leung
Download or read book Utopian Fiction in China written by Shuk Man Leung and published by Sinica Leidensia. This book was released on 2023-10-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book studies utopian fiction as a knowledge apparatus by connecting three aspects of late Qing culture: the rise of modern press, the emergence of new genre, and the epistemology of modernity, while reflecting on the ability of utopian imagination to develop the three-way relationship between new people, new China, and new genre via the Chinese public sphere.
Book Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature by : Gregory Claeys
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature written by Gregory Claeys and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of Thomas More's genre-defining work Utopia in 1516, the field of utopian literature has evolved into an ever-expanding domain. This Companion presents an extensive historical survey of the development of utopianism, from the publication of Utopia to today's dark and despairing tendency towards dystopian pessimism, epitomised by works such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Chapters address the difficult definition of the concept of utopia, and consider its relation to science fiction and other literary genres. The volume takes an innovative approach to the major themes predominating within the utopian and dystopian literary tradition, including feminism, romance and ecology, and explores in detail the vexed question of the purportedly 'western' nature of the concept of utopia. The reader is provided with a balanced overview of the evolution and current state of a long-standing, rich tradition of historical, political and literary scholarship.
Book Synopsis The Reincarnated Giant by : Mingwei Song
Download or read book The Reincarnated Giant written by Mingwei Song and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new wave of Chinese science fiction is here. This golden age has not only resurrected the genre but also subverted its own conventions. Going beyond political utopianism and technological optimism, contemporary Chinese writers conjure glittering visions and subversive experiments—ranging from space opera to cyberpunk, utopianism to the posthuman, and parodies of China’s rise to deconstructions of the myth of national development. This anthology showcases the best of contemporary science fiction from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China. In fifteen short stories and novel excerpts, The Reincarnated Giant opens a doorway into imaginary realms alongside our own world and the history of the future. Authors such as Lo Yi-chin, Dung Kai-cheung, Han Song, Chen Qiufan, and the Hugo winner Liu Cixin—some alive during the Cultural Revolution, others born in the 1980s—blur the boundaries between realism and surrealism, between politics and technology. They tell tales of intergalactic war; decoding the last message sent from an extinct human race; the use of dreams as tools to differentiate cyborgs and humans; poets’ strange afterlife inside a supercomputer; cannibalism aboard an airplane; and unchecked development that leads to uncontrollable catastrophe. At a time when the Chinese government promotes the “Chinese dream,” the dark side of the new wave shows a nightmarish unconscious. The Reincarnated Giant is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of the genre.
Book Synopsis Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context by : David Der-wei Wang
Download or read book Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context written by David Der-wei Wang and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-05 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context: Texts, Ideas, Spaces decisively demonstrates the extent to which utopianism has shaped political thought, cultural imaginaries, and social engagement after it was introduced into the Chinese context in the nineteenth century. In fact, pursuit of utopia has often led to action—such as the Chinese Revolution and the Umbrella Movement—and contested consequences. Covering a time span that goes from the late Qing to our days, the authors show that few ideas have been as influencing as utopia, which has compellingly shaped the imaginaries that underpin China’s historical change. Utopianism contributed to the formation of the Chinese state itself—shaping the thought of key figures of the late Qing and early Republican eras such as Kang Youwei and Sun Yat-sen—and outlived the labyrinthine debates of the second half of the twentieth century, both under Mao’s rule and during the post-socialist era. Even in the current times of dystopian narratives, a period in which utopia seems to be less influential than in the past, its manifestations persistently provide lifelines against fatalism or cynicism. This collection shows how profoundly utopian ideas have nurtured both the thought of crucial figures during these historical times, the new generation of mainland Chinese and Sinophone intellectuals, and the hopes of twenty-first-century Hong Kong activists. “Wang, Leung, and Zhang’s collection is a timely contribution to utopian studies built on consistent, coherent, boundary-crossing approaches. Interdisciplinary in its very sense, the essays bring intellectual history, literary studies, philosophy, and political theories together in dialogue. Of particular note are the essays that situate Hong Kong in a literary tradition that connects China, Hong Kong, and the beyond.” —Mingwei Song, Wellesley College “Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context is an impressive intellectual undertaking. The essays are highly engaging and offer powerful, multi-faceted approaches to utopianism in contemporary Chinese thought and practice. Stimulating and informative, the book as a whole addresses the dynamic interplay between the utopian and dystopian, thereby inspiring clarity in political thought and action in the present moment.” —Robin Visser, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Book Synopsis Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels by : Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Download or read book Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels written by Jeffrey C. Kinkley and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The depiction of personal and collective suffering in modern Chinese novels differs significantly from standard Communist accounts and most Eastern and Western historical narratives. Writers such as Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Ge Fei, Li Rui, and Zhang Wei scramble common conceptions of ChinaÕs modern development, deploying avant-garde narrative techniques from Latin American and Euro-American modernism to project a surprisingly Òun-ChineseÓ dystopian vision and critical view of human culture and ethics. The epic narratives of modern Chinese fiction make rich use of magical realism, surrealism, and unusual treatments of historical time. Also featuring graphic depictions of sex and violence and dark, raunchy comedy, these novels deeply reflect ChinaÕs turbulent recent history, re-presenting the overthrow of the monarchy in the early twentieth century and the resulting chaos of revolution and war; the recurring miseries perpetrated by class warfare during the dictatorship of Mao Zedong; and the social dislocations caused by ChinaÕs industrialization and rise as a global power. This book casts ChinaÕs highbrow historical novels from the 1990s to the mid-2000s as a distinctively Chinese contribution to the form of the global dystopian novel and, consequently, to global thinking about the interrelations of utopia and dystopia.
Book Synopsis Tales of Futures Past by : Paola Iovene
Download or read book Tales of Futures Past written by Paola Iovene and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation building, and with the utopian visions broadcast by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future is thus understood as a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces "anticipation"—the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds—as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture from the 1950s to 2011. In doing so, Paola Iovene connects the emergence of new literary genres with changing visions of the future in contemporary China. This book provides a nuanced and dynamic account of the relationship between state discourses, market pressures, and individual writers and texts. It stresses authors' and editors' efforts to redefine what constitutes literature under changing political and economic circumstances. Engaging with questions of translation, temporality, formation of genres, and stylistic change, Iovene mines Chinese science fiction and popular science, puts forward a new interpretation of familiar Chinese avant-garde fiction, and offers close readings of texts that have not yet received any attention in English-language scholarship. Far-ranging in its chronological scope and impressive in its interdisciplinary approach, this book rethinks the legacies of socialism in postsocialist Chinese literary modernity.
Book Synopsis Chinese and Western Literary Influence in Liu Cixin’s Three Body Trilogy by : Will Peyton
Download or read book Chinese and Western Literary Influence in Liu Cixin’s Three Body Trilogy written by Will Peyton and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-07-30 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese and Western Literary Influence in Liu Cixin’s Three Body Trilogy examines Liu Cixin’s acclaimed trilogy, a Chinese science fiction epic whose translation is exceedingly popular in the Western world. Will Peyton argues that the ingenuity of Liu’s writing is found in its conscious engagement with translated Western fiction rather than, as one might expect, in Chinese language science fiction of the past. The book illustrates how contemporary Chinese fiction, since the economic opening of China in the late 1980s, is deeply and complexly influenced by various strains in Western literary and intellectual thought, an area that scholars of Chinese literature have tended to neglect. Providing a lucid and succinct close-reading and textual analysis of Three Body trilogy, the book also makes reference to broader ideas and themes in modern Chinese and Western intellectual history.
Book Synopsis Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias by : Qingyun Wu
Download or read book Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias written by Qingyun Wu and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Qingyun Wu's work is a unique discovery in literary studies in the West. Chinese utopian literature paired with its English counterparts form an original and valuable contribution to world literature. In widely varying historical and cultural texts that span the last five centuries, Wu analyzes the theme of female rule, including a critique of patriarchy and emphasizing a vision for women. To date, Chinese utopias have been insufficiently explored and unavailable to Western scholars. Wu's theories of the politics of female rule, as seen in Chinese and English literature since the end of the sixteenth century, are predicated on three significant changes that have taken place during those periods. These include an outright rejection of rule by women to rule by women in the guise of men, from individual to collective female rule, and from an idealized matrilineality to anarchism by the female principle. Works examined include Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Luo Maodeng's Sanbao's Expedition to the Western Ocean, Florence Dixie's Gloriana, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Chen Duansheng's The Destiny of the Next Life, Li Ruzhen's The Flowers in the Mirror, and Bai Hua's The Remote Country of Women. This critical view of the development of feminist utopias in both the East and West will be of interest to scholars of women's studies, political science, and anthropology as well as to those in literature for both the classical and modern periods.
Download or read book China Dream written by Ma Jian and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending fact and fiction, this darkly comic fable “may be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party’s moral failings” (Mike Ives, The New York Times). Called “Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!" by Margaret Atwood on Twitter, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode's nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future. Exposing the damage inflicted on a nation's soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth, China Dream is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state–imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.
Download or read book Consuming Utopia written by John Storey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consuming Utopia builds on critical insights into consumption and utopianism developed in two previous books by the author to elaborate what it means to read utopian fiction (including dystopian and anti-utopian) from the critical perspective of cultural studies. With a critical focus on social practices of reading rather than on the text itself, John Storey advances a timely and relevant contribution to existing debates on utopian fiction, offering new insights into how we might understand the politics of utopian fiction. Finding readership and readers indispensable to the act of producing politics beyond the text, Storey argues that if utopian fiction has a ‘politics’, it is determined by those who, in actuality, pick up books and act on what they read, rather than readers proposed by textuality. By engaging with seminal concepts in cultural studies, this book shows how reading utopian fiction works to make the meaning of such texts material and social, and therefore available for politics. An essential addition to the literature on utopian fiction, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the areas of cultural studies, literary studies, comparative literature, cultural politics, utopian studies, and political theory.
Book Synopsis Visions of Dystopia in China’s New Historical Novels by : Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Download or read book Visions of Dystopia in China’s New Historical Novels written by Jeffrey C. Kinkley and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The depiction of personal and collective suffering in modern Chinese novels differs significantly from standard Communist accounts and many Eastern and Western historical narratives. Writers such as Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Ge Fei, Li Rui, and Zhang Wei skew and scramble common conceptions of China's modern development, deploying avant-garde narrative techniques from Latin American and Euro-American modernism to project a surprisingly "un-Chinese" dystopian vision and critical view of human culture and ethics. The epic narratives of modern Chinese fiction make rich use of magical realism, surrealism, and unusual treatments of historical time. Also featuring graphic depictions of sex and violence, as well as dark, raunchy comedy, these novels reflect China's recent history re-presenting the overthrow of the monarchy in the early twentieth century and the resulting chaos of revolution and war; the recurring miseries perpetrated by class warfare during the dictatorship of Mao Zedong; and the social dislocations caused by China's industrialization and rise as a global power. This book casts China's highbrow historical novels from the late 1980s to the first decade of the twenty-first century as a distinctively Chinese contribution to the form of the global dystopian novel and, consequently, to global thinking about the interrelations of utopia and dystopia.
Book Synopsis The Adventures of China Iron by : Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Download or read book The Adventures of China Iron written by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and published by Charco Press. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020 1872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through the pampas in the company of her new-found friend Liz, a settler from Scotland. While Liz provides China with a sentimental education and schools her in the nefarious ways of the British Empire, their eyes are opened to the wonders of Argentina’s richly diverse flora and fauna, cultures and languages, as well as to the ruthless violence involved in nation-building. This subversive retelling of Argentina’s foundational gaucho epic Martín Fierro is a celebration of the colour and movement of the living world, the open road, love and sex, and the dream of lasting freedom. With humour and sophistication, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara has created a joyful, hallucinatory novel that is also an incisive critique of national myths.
Book Synopsis Comparative Print Culture by : Rasoul Aliakbari
Download or read book Comparative Print Culture written by Rasoul Aliakbari and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on comparative literary studies, postcolonial book history, and multiple, literary, and alternative modernities, this collection approaches the study of alternative literary modernities from the perspective ofcomparative print culture. The term comparative print culture designates a wide range of scholarly practices that discover, examine, document, and/or historicize various printed materials and their reproduction, circulation, and uses across genres, languages, media, and technologies, all within a comparative orientation. This book explores alternative literary modernities mostly by highlighting the distinct ways in which literary and cultural print modernities outside Europe evince the repurposing of European systems and cultures of print and further deconstruct their perceived universality.
