Description
Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking book by the eminent Peking University professor Hong Zicheng covers the literary scene in China during the 1949-1999 period, primarily focusing on fiction, poetry, drama, and prose writing. Reprinted sixteen times since its publication in the PRC in 1999, it is now available in English translation at last. A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature is a unique and much needed accomplishment in contemporary literary studies.
Trade Review“There is no doubt that this volume, along with the Humanities in China Library series it inaugurates, should serve as a model for further translations of influential Chinese-language scholarship in years to come.” - Rossella Ferrari, SOAS, University of London (China Quarterly) "Hong (Peking Univ.) offers an excellent, dual-purpose book: it serves as both a textbook and a comprehensive history of Chinese literature from the 1940s to 1996...Highly recommended." - Choice "...[A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature's] significance is the scope of its overview of mainland Chinese fiction, poetry, prose, and aspects of theater through the mid-1990s in their documented institutional and critical context... Hong's history is well documented, with annotated citations of both criticisms from the time the works were published and from more recent scholars of the contemporary period, especially Huang Ziping and Zhu Zhai. There is welcome attention to a range of valuable topics, from institutional structures, biographical notes, translations of foreign literature and other texts available through the restricted "internal distribution" (neibu) system of publication, unofficial, underground texts of the Cultural Revolution era, and so forth... [Translator] Michael M. Day's translation greatly enhances the value of Hong's book as a reference text by adding [added] a bibliography, glossary, and index and [shifted] Hong's endnotes to footnotes. [This text is] a solid and comprehensive survey that will stand as an important reference and source for new scholarship... [and] could provide a centerpiece for an engaging and productive course on the field." - Edward Gunn, Cornell University (MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September 2008))
