Description
Book SynopsisThis collection provides a critical reexamination of the development and current status of comparative literature studies that engage the literary practices of both China and the West. It attempts to refashion literary methodologies and cultural theories in Chinese studies and reread several noncanonical texts in ways that cut across disciplines, genders, and modernities.
Trade Review"
China in a Polycentric World provides an important and much-needed testimony to the rewards and difficulties inherent in the challenge of practicing a comparative approach that reaches beyond the sphere of Western literatures. At its best, the book spurs scholars to question long-held assumptions about what literature is, how it can be talked about, and who is doing the talking." * China Review International *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: engaging Chinese comparative literature and cultural studies Yingjin Zhang Part I. Discipline, Discourse, Canon: 1. The challenge of East-West comparative literature Zhang Longxi 2. The utopias of discourse: on the impossibility of Chinese comparative literature David Palumbo-Liu 3. Canon formation in traditional Chinese poetry: Chinese canons, sacred and profane Mark E. Francis Part II. Gender, Sexuality, Body: 4. A feminist re-vision of Xu Wei's Ci Mulan and Nü zhuangyuan Ann-Marie Hsiung 5. Gender, subjectivity, sexuality: defining a subversive discourse in Wang Anyi's four tales of sexual transgression Helen H. Chen 6. Consuming Asian women: the fluid body of Josie Packard in Twin Peaks Greta Ai-Yu Niu Part III. Science, Modernity, Aesthetics: 7. Travel and translation: an aspect of china's cultural modernity, 1862-1926 John Yu Zou 8. Baoyu in Wonderland: technological Utopia in the early modern Chinese science fiction novel Feng-Ying Ming 9. The texture of the metropolis: modernist inscriptions of Shanghai in the 1930s Yingjin Zhang 10. The cult of poetry in contemporary China Michelle Yeh 11. Tianya, the ends of the world or the edge of heaven: comparative literature at the fin de siecle Eugene Chen Eoyang.
