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Why Fiction Matters In Contemporary China
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Book Synopsis Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China by : David Der-wei Wang
Download or read book Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China written by David Der-wei Wang and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary discussions of China tend to focus on politics and economics, giving Chinese culture little if any attention. Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers a corrective, revealing the crucial role that fiction plays in helping contemporary Chinese citizens understand themselves and their nation. Where history fails to address the consequences of man-made and natural atrocities, David Der-Wei Wang argues, fiction arises to bear witness to the immemorial and unforeseeable. Beginning by examining President Xi Jinping's call in 2013 to "tell the good China story," Wang illuminates how contemporary Chinese cultural politics have taken a "fictional turn," which can trace its genealogy to early modern times. He does so by addressing a series of discourses by critics within China, including Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Shen Congwen, as well as critics from the West such as Arendt, Benjamin, and Deleuze. Wang highlights the variety and vitality of fictional works from China as well as the larger Sinophone world, ranging from science fiction to political allegory, erotic escapade to utopia and dystopia. The result is an insightful account of contemporary China, one that affords countless new insights and avenues for understanding.
Book Synopsis Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China by : Dewei Wang
Download or read book Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China written by Dewei Wang and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Contemporary discussions of China tend to focus on politics and economics, giving Chinese culture little if any attention. Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers a corrective, revealing the crucial role that fiction plays in helping contemporary Chinese citizens understand themselves and their nation. Where history fails to address the consequences of man-made and natural atrocities, David Der-wei Wang argues, fiction arises to bear witness to the immemorial and unforeseeable. Beginning by examining President Xi Jinping's call in 2013 to "tell the good China story," Wang illuminates how contemporary Chinese cultural politics have taken a "fictional turn," which can trace its genealogy to early modern times. He does so by addressing a series of discourses by critics within China, including Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Shen Congwen, as well as critics from the West such as Arendt, Benjamin, and Deleuze. Wang highlights the variety and vitality of fictional works from China as well as the larger Sinophone world, ranging from science fiction to political allegory, erotic escapade to utopia and dystopia. The result is an insightful account of contemporary China, one that affords countless new insights and avenues for understanding"--
Download or read book The Subplot written by Megan Walsh and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you've never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by rotten girls, swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel-laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden-age of sci-fi. Chinese online fiction is now the largest publishing platform in the world. Fueled by her passionate engagement with the arts and ideas of China's people, Megan Walsh, a brilliant young critic, shows us why it's important to finally pay attention to Chinese fiction--an exuberant drama that illustrates the complex relationship between art and politics, one that is increasingly shaping the West as well. Turns out, writers write neither what their government nor foreign readers want or expect, as they work on a different wavelength to keep alive ideas and events that are censored by the propaganda machine. The Subplot vividly captures the way in which literature offers an alternative--perhaps truer--way to understanding the contradictions that make up China itself.
Download or read book Peach Blossom Paradise written by Ge Fei and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enthralling story of revolution, idealism, and a savage struggle for utopia by one of China's greatest living novelists. In 1898 reformist intellectuals in China persuaded the young emperor that it was time to transform his sclerotic empire into a prosperous modern state. The Hundred Days’ Reform that followed was a moment of unprecedented change and extraordinary hope—brought to an abrupt end by a bloody military coup. Dashed expectations would contribute to the revolutionary turn that Chinese history would soon take, leading in time to the deaths of millions. Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at his estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative. This mysterious man has a great vision of reforging China as an egalitarian utopia, and he will stop at nothing to make it real. It is his own plans, however, which come to nothing, and his “little sister” Xiumi is left to take up arms against a Confucian world in which women are chattel. Her campaign for change and her struggle to seize control over her own body are continually threatened by the violent whims of men who claim to be building paradise.
Book Synopsis Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua by : Hua Li
Download or read book Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua written by Hua Li and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-02-18 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of this study is coming of age in troubled Cultural Revolutionary times as portrayed in contemporary Chinese Bildungsroman fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua, along with a comprehensive overview of the Bildungsroman in China and the west.
Book Synopsis A Novel Approach to China by : Gengsong Gao
Download or read book A Novel Approach to China written by Gengsong Gao and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores Chinese novelists’ distinctive contributions to the China debate in terms of the key issues of Chinese language, power dynamics and Confucian tradition. As China is rising, Chinese scholars and policymakers are debating heatedly over China’s past, present and future. Who are the major debaters? How do they analyze China’s problems and figure out solutions? What are the main achievements and weaknesses of the Chinese intellectual debate and discourse? Chinese novelists also get involved in the China debate. However, their voices are rarely heard. This book argues that, by dramatizing the diversities of ordinary social actors’ everyday languages, active discursive practices and enchanted local traditions, Chinese novelists do not merely illustrate the dominant liberal, the New Left and the New Confucian ideologies, but enrich the China debate and provide a “novel” approach to our understanding of modern China.
Book Synopsis Modern China: All That Matters by : Jonathan Clements
Download or read book Modern China: All That Matters written by Jonathan Clements and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-08-30 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Modern China: All That Matters, Jonathan Clements presents China as the Chinese themselves see it. He explains the key issues of national reconstruction; the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, and the dizzying spectacle of China's economic reform. Clements offers a Chinese perspective on such events as the Handover of Hong Kong, and chronicles the historical events that continue to resonate today in Chinese politics, economics, culture and quality of life. A final chapter examines China's role in the global marketplace, its indirect effect on foreign economies from Australia to America to Africa, and its growing military might, with an assessment of the damage done to its environment and population. In his most provocative assertion, Clements suggests that China's contemporary problems are not the trials of a developing nation, but a possible vision of our own future. This accessible and readable book will appeal both to students and general readers, giving a fascinating introduction to modern China - and what matters most about it.
Book Synopsis China Mysteries by : Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Download or read book China Mysteries written by Jeffrey C. Kinkley and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the 1989 Beijing massacre fading from popular memory in the West, China from the mid-1990s to a few years ago felt more open than ever to global trade, communication, travel, and cultural and educational exchanges. There was even talk in the mainstream press that China was heading toward a more democratic future. It was during this second Sino-Western honeymoon that authors in the US, Canada, France, the UK, and elsewhere began writing mystery fiction set in contemporary China in their regional languages. These “China mysteries”—crime, detective, and mystery thriller novels that take place in China but were not written or published there—formed a new genre of popular fiction that highlighted the world’s hopes and fears after Tiananmen. The multinational and multicultural writers of China mysteries, among them ex-PRC nationals like Qiu Xiaolong, Zhang Xinxin, and Diane Wei Liang, converged on the China Mainland to negotiate political and cultural complexities through crime fiction plotlines. Their books emerged from Western lineages of the modern novel and popular genre fiction—with Chinese contributions—and depended on Western commercial publishing models shaped by cultural, national, political, and economic factors. This work examines more than a hundred China mysteries—many describing and analyzing social and economic changes at the center of modern life in China—to provide a brief history of the genre and analyze the formulaic and original elements of the mysteries, including their attention to matters of location, social content, characterization, history, and biography. It also highlights the role of “information” acquisition as a motivation for readers and authors of popular fiction, which has become a topic of discussion in Chinese literature studies. With its timely commentary on Sino-Western relations as presented through crime fiction, China Mysteries will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Chinese literature and culture, as well as fans of crime novels and others who are curious about the global dimensions of the genre and how it complicates our understanding of “world literature.”
Download or read book The Time is Not Yet Ripe written by 殷边 and published by Beijing : Foreign Languages Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This excellent collection of writings by China's brightest contemporary authors, with a brief biography of each author is a great introduction to today's writers, & widely used as a college text.
Book Synopsis From May Fourth to June Fourth by : Ellen Widmer
Download or read book From May Fourth to June Fourth written by Ellen Widmer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do the Chinese literature and film inspired by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) have in common with the Chinese literature and film of the May Fourth movement (1918-1930)? This new book demonstrates that these two periods of the highest literary and cinematic creativity in twentieth-century China share several aims: to liberate these narrative arts from previous aesthetic orthodoxies, to draw on foreign sources for inspiration, and to free individuals from social conformity. Although these consistencies seem readily apparent, with a sharper focus the distinguished contributors to this volume reveal that in many ways discontinuity, not continuity, prevails. Their analysis illuminates the powerful meeting place of language, imagery, and narrative with politics, history, and ideology in twentieth-century China. Drawing on a wide range of methodologies, from formal analysis to feminist criticism, from deconstruction to cultural critique, the authors demonstrate that the scholarship of modern Chinese literature and film has become integral to contemporary critical discourse. They respond to Eurocentric theories, but their ultimate concern is literature and film in China's unique historical context. The volume illustrates three general issues preoccupying this century's scholars: the conflict of the rural search for roots and the native soil movement versus the new strains of urban exoticism; the diacritics of voice, narrative mode, and intertextuality; and the reintroduction of issues surrounding gender and subjectivity. Table of Contents: Preface Acknowledgments Introduction David Der-wei Wang part:1 Country and City 1. Visitation of the Past in Han Shaogong's Post-1985 Fiction Joseph S. M. Lau 2. Past, Present, and Future in Mo Yan's Fiction of the 1980s Michael S. Duke 3. Shen Congwen's Legacy in Chinese Literature of the 1980s Jeffrey C. Kinkley 4. Imaginary Nostalgia: Shen Congwen, Song Zelai, Mo Yan, and Li Yongping David Der-wei Wang 5. Urban Exoticism in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature Heinrich Fruehauf part: 2 Subjectivity and Gender 6. Text, Intertext, and the Representation of the Writing Self in Lu Yun, Dafu,and Wang Meng Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker 7. Invention and Intervention: The Making of a Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature Lydia H. Liu 8. Living in Sin: From May Fourth via the Antirightist Movement to the Present Margaret H. Decker part: 3 Narrative Voice and Cinematic Vision 9. Lu Xun's Facetious Muse: The Creative Imperative in Modern Chinese Fiction Marston Anderson 10. Lives in Profile: On the Authorial Voice in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature Theodore Huters 11. Melodramatic Representation and the "May Fourth" Tradition of Chinese Cinema Paul G. Pickowicz 12. Male Narcissism and National Culture: Subjectivity in Chen Kaige's King of the Children Rey Chow Afterword: Reflections on Change and Continuity in Modern Chinese Fiction Leo Ou-fan Lee Notes Contributors From May Fourth to June Fourth will he warmly welcomed. It should be of great interest to all concerned with literary developments in the contemporary world on the one hand, and on the other with the enigmas surrounding China's alternating attempts to develop and to destroy herself as a civilization. --Cyril Birch, University of California, Berkeley
Book Synopsis Stories of Contemporary China by : Winston L. Y. Yang
Download or read book Stories of Contemporary China written by Winston L. Y. Yang and published by New York : Paragon Book Gallery. This book was released on 1979 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Explosion Chronicles by : Yan Lianke
Download or read book The Explosion Chronicles written by Yan Lianke and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A rip-roaring Swiftian satire from a contemporary Chinese master” follows a rural community’s transformation from small village to megalopolis (The Economist). With the Yi River on one side and the Balou Mountains on the other, the village of Explosion was founded more than a millennium ago by refugees fleeing a seismic volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era the name takes on a new significance as the community grows explosively from a small village to a vast metropolis. Behind this rapid expansion are members of the community’s three major families, including the four Kong brothers; Zhu Ying, the daughter of the former village chief; and Cheng Qing, who starts out as a secretary and goes on to become a powerful political and business figure. Linked together by a complex web of loyalty, betrayal, desire, and ambition, these figures are the driving force behind their hometown’s transformation into an urban superpower. Brimming with absurdity, intelligence, and wit, The Explosion Chronicles considers the high stakes of passion and power, the consequences of corruption and greed, the polarizing dynamics of love and hate between families, as well as humankind’s resourcefulness through the vicissitudes of life. “Yan’s burlesque of a nation driven insane by money is equally a satire of some of the excesses of the Chinese Revolution.” —The Wall Street Journal
Book Synopsis The Routledge Companion to Yan Lianke by : Riccardo Moratto
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Yan Lianke written by Riccardo Moratto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 811 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yan Lianke is one of the most important, prolific, and controversial writers in contemporary China. At the forefront of the “mythorealist” Chinese avant-garde and using absurdist humor and grotesque satire, Yan’s works have caught much critical attention not only in the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan but also around the world. His critiques of modern China under both Mao-era socialism and contemporary capitalism draw on a deep knowledge of history, folklore, and spirituality. This companion presents a collection of critical essays by leading scholars of Yan Lianke from around the world, organized into some of the key themes of his work: Mythorealism; Absurdity and Spirituality; and History and Gender, as well as the challenges of translating his work into English and other languages. With an essay written by Yan Lianke himself, this is a vital and authoritative resource for students and scholars looking to understand Yan’s works from both his own perspective and those of leading critics.
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 The Day the Sun Died by : Yan Lianke
Download or read book The Day the Sun Died written by Yan Lianke and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘One of the masters of modern Chinese literature’ Jung Chang This gripping dystopia contrasts the reality of life in China today with the sunny optimism of the ‘Chinese dream’. One dusk in early June, in a town deep in the Balou mountains, fourteen-year-old Li Niannian notices that something strange is going on. As the residents would usually be settling down for the night, instead they start appearing in the streets and fields. There are people everywhere. Li Niannian watches, mystified. Until he realises the people are dreamwalking, carrying on with their daily business as if the sun hadn’t already gone down. And before too long, as more and more people succumb, in the black of night all hell breaks loose. Set over the course of one night, The Day the Sun Died pits chaos and darkness against the bright ‘Chinese dream’ promoted by President Xi Jinping. We are thrown into the middle of an increasingly strange and troubling waking nightmare as Li Niannian and his father struggle to save the town, and persuade the beneficent sun to rise again. Praise for Yan Lianke's books: ‘Nothing short of a masterpiece’ Guardian ‘A hyper-real tour de force, a blistering condemnation of political corruption and excess’ Financial Times ‘Mordant satire from a brave fabulist’ Daily Mail ‘Exuberant and imaginative’ Sunday Times ‘I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth’ New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Sinoglossia written by Andrea Bachner and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-12 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sinoglossia places the terms of embodiment, mediality, and translation at the center of analytical inquiry into Chinese and Sinophone cultures. Converging in the rubric of Sinoglossia, the chapters in this volume introduce a theory defined by cultural formations not overdetermined by Sinitic linguistic ties. The concept of Sinoglossia combines a heteroglossic and a heterotopian approach to the critical study of mediated discourses of China and Chineseness. From the history of physical examinations and queer subalternity to the cinematic inscription of Chineseness-as-landscape, and from Sinopop to the translational writings of Eileen Chang and Syaman Rapongan, this book argues for a flexible conceptualization of cultural objects, conditions, and contexts that draws attention to an array of polyphonic, multi-discursive, and multilingual articulations. In this new horizon of understanding, place or topos necessarily constitutes the possibility of friction and source of innovation. “Sinoglossia opens new possibilities for critical studies of China, Chineseness, and Chinese cultures. Bringing together pathbreaking scholarship from diverse perspectives, and highlighting multiplicity and heterogeneity on a range of topics, this volume is a vital addition to a range of fields.” —Karen L. Thornber, Harvard University “Vitally centering and theorizing processes of embodiment, mediality, and translation, this timely and rich volume—simultaneously reflective, speculative, comparative, and historically informed—convincingly articulates Sinoglossia as a flexible, heterogeneous approach to intercultural phenomena tenuously identified as Chinese or Sinophone.” —Brian Bernards, University of Southern California
Download or read book Fear of Seeing written by Mingwei Song and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new wave of cutting-edge, risk-taking science fiction has energized twenty-first-century Chinese literature. These works capture the anticipation and anxieties of China’s new era, speaking to a future filled with uncertainties. Deeply entangled with the politics and culture of a changing China, contemporary science fiction has also attracted a growing global readership. Fear of Seeing traces the new wave’s origin and development over the past three decades, exploring the core concerns and literary strategies that make it so distinctive and vital. Mingwei Song argues that recent Chinese science fiction is united by a capacity to illuminate what had been invisible—what society had chosen not to see; what conventional literature had failed to represent. Its poetics of the invisible opens up new literary possibilities and inspires new ways of telling stories about China and the world. Reading the works of major writers such as Liu Cixin and Han Song as well as lesser-known figures, Song explores how science fiction has spurred larger changes in contemporary literature and culture. He analyzes key topics: variations of utopia and dystopia, cyborgs and the posthuman, and nonbinary perspectives on gender and genre, among many more. A compelling and authoritative account of the politics and poetics of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Fear of Seeing is an important book for all readers interested in the genre’s significance for twenty-first-century literature.
