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The written culture of 20th-century China has only recently begun to receive sustained attention from Western readers and critics. This book presents illuminating information on writers, audiences, and the impact of various literary works on politics and culture--and provides a unique window on Chinese society.
At least since the late nineteenth century onwards, Chinese literature as a form of cultural production has been taking place within a specific social space, including writers, critics, journalists, editors, publishers, printers and booksellers. Focusing on people as well as on texts, and looking at what writers did as well as at what they wrote, the essays in this volume draw a vivid and variegated picture of Chinese literary life throughout the modern period. The book treats differences between periods, but also traces the continuities that have characterised modern Chinese literary practice and its discourses from the beginning to the present, including ties of allegiance, utilisation of 'the people' and appropriation of the west. The book places modern Chinese literature firmly within its socio-historical context, thereby increasing the reader's awareness of the hidden assumptions behind literary production. In doing so, it opens new perspectives on Chinese culture as a whole, and on literature as a cosmopolitan concept.
In the aftermath of the May Fourth movement, a growing expectation of revolution raised important intellectual issues about the position of the individual within a society in turmoil and the shifting boundaries of political and sexual identities. The theme of "revolution plus love," a literary response to the widespread insurrections and upheaval, was first popularized in the late 1920s. In her examination of this popular but understudied literary formula, Liu Jianmei argues that revolution and love are culturally variable entities, their interplay a complex and constantly changing literary practice that is socially and historically determined. Liu looks at the formulary writing of "revolution plus love" from the 1930s to the 1970s as a case study of literary politics. Favored by leftist writers during the early period of revolutionary literature, it continued to influence mainstream Chinese literature up to the 1970s. By drawing a historical picture of the articulation and rearticulation of this theme, Liu shows how changes in revolutionary discourse force unpredictable representations of gender rules and power relations, and how women's bodies reveal the complex interactions between political representation and gender roles. Revolution Plus Love is a nuanced and carefully considered work on gender and modernity in China, unmatched in its broad use of literary resources. It will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of modern Chinese literature, women’s studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.
"Only women and inferior men are difficult to deal with." — Confucius Two thousand years after Confucius, the contributors to this book ask if Chinese women have succeeded in changing their status as the equivalent of "inferior men." Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society approaches the role of women in social change through analyzing literature and culture during the May Fourth and the Post-Cultural Revolution periods.
A comprehensive collection on twentieth-century educational practices in China
In the first half of the twentieth century, urban Chinese regularly lost themselves in tales of scandalous affairs, tender romances, and splendid acts of martial gallantry--standard reading fare on Saturdays among city dwellers craving entertainment and escape. Openly disdained by many intellectuals for their frothy content and maudlin appeal, these tales have been largely ignored in histories and anthologies of modern Chinese fiction both in China and the West. Recently, however, increasing attention has been paid to this fiction and its place in the vibrant tradition of Chinese writing during a period of rapid cultural change. The stories selected and translated here invited Chinese readers to enter worlds at once connected to and removed from their familiar surroundings. Today, the stories have become a record of what urban life was actually like, as well as what readers then wished it to be. Like Chinese from decades past indulging in a pleasurable hour or two on a Saturday afternoon, readers of English can now enjoy and learn from these diverse stories, expertly translated. The volume's afterword provides valuable insights into this long-overlooked area of modern Chinese literature.
Although deconstruction has become a popular catchword, as an intellectual movement it has never entirely caught on within the university. For some in the academy, deconstruction, and Jacques Derrida in particular, are responsible for the demise of accountability in the study of literature. Countering these facile dismissals of Derrida and deconstruction, Herman Rapaport explores the incoherence that has plagued critical theory since the 1960s and the resulting legitimacy crisis in the humanities. Against the backdrop of a rich, informed discussion of Derrida's writings -- and how they have been misconstrued by critics and admirers alike -- The Theory Mess investigates the vicissitudes of Anglo-American criticism over the past thirty years and proposes some possibilities for reform.
A panoramic vision of the Chinese literary landscape across the twentieth century. Award-winning literary scholar and poet Yunte Huang here gathers together an intimate and authoritative selection of significant works, in outstanding translations, from nearly fifty Chinese writers, that together express a search for the soul of modern China. From the 1912 overthrow of a millennia-long monarchy to the Cultural Revolution, to China’s rise as a global military and economic superpower, the Chinese literary imagination has encompassed an astonishing array of moods and styles—from sublime lyricism to witty surrealism, poignant documentary to the ironic, the transgressive, and the defiant. Huang provides the requisite context for these revelatory works of fiction, poetry, essays, letters, and speeches in helpful headnotes, chronologies, and brief introductions to the Republican, Revolutionary, and Post-Mao Eras. From Lu Xun’s Call to Arms (1923) to Gao Xinjiang’s Nobel Prize–winning Soul Mountain (1990), this remarkable anthology features writers both known and unknown in its celebration of the versatility of writing. From belles lettres to literary propaganda, from poetic revolution to pulp fiction, The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature is an eye-opening, mesmerizing, and indispensable portrait of China in the tumultuous twentieth century.
Through both cultural and literary analysis, this book examines gender in relation to late Qing and modern Chinese intellectuals, including Mu Shiying, Bai Wei, and Lu Xun. Tackling important, previously neglected questions, Zhu ultimately shows the resilience and malleability of Chinese modernity through its progressive views on femininity.
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.