Description
Book SynopsisPresents a preliminary survey of modern Chinese literature in the second half of the twentieth century. This title introduces figures, works, and debates that constitute the dynamics of Chinese literature from 1949 to the end of the century. It depicts the enunciative endeavours that inform the polyphonic discourse of Chinese cultural politics.
Trade ReviewThis book is the result of an unprecedented conference, participated in by writers and scholars from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the US, Europe, and mainland China, and held in Taipei in 1993. The 15 critical essays survey modern Chinese literature by writers on the China mainland, in Hong Kong, on Taiwan, and overseas, spanning the second half of the 20th century. The final essay, a comprehensive bibliographic survey of publications on Chinese literature in translation from 1949 to 1999, complete with a long list of translations, is a very important reference document, particularly for those who do not read Chinese. Wang (Columbia Univ.) wrote the introduction, which amounts to a short history of Chinese literature of this period. The contents of the book are up-to-date and make an important contribution to the study of recent Chinese literature. Recommended for libraries with collections in modern Chinese literature and comparative literature. Upper-division undergraduates and above.July 2001
-- Y. L. Walls * Simon Fraser University *
Table of ContentsPreface, Pang-yuan Chi
Editors' Note
Introduction, David Der-wei Wang
1. Farewell to the Gods: Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory's Fin-de-siecle Struggle, Zaifu Liu
2. Taiwan Literature: 1945-1999, Pang-yuan Chi
3. Colonialism, the Cold War, and Marginal Space: The Existential Condition of Five Decades of Hong Kong Literature, William Tay
4. Reinventing National History: Communist and Anti-communist Fiction of the Mid-Twentieth Century, David Der-wei Wang
5. The School and the Hospital: On the Logics of Socialist Realism, Su Wei
6. Modernism and Its Discontents: Taiwanese Literature in the 1960s, Ko Ch'ing-ming
7. Beyond "Nativist Realism": Taiwan Fiction in the 1970s and 1980s, Yang Chao
8. Searching for Roots: Anticultural Return in Mainland Chinese Literature of the 1980s, Li Qingxi
9. Re-membering the Cultural Revolution: Chinese Avant-garde Literature of the 1980s, Wu Liang
10. Resistance to Modernity: Reflections on Mainland Chinese Literary Criticism in the 1980s, Li Tuo
11. Feminism and Female Taiwan Novelists in the 1980s and 1990s
12. Breaking Open: Chinese Women's Writing the Late 1980s and 1990s, Jingyuan Zhang
13. The Cultural Imaginary of a City: Reading Hong Kong Through Xi Xi, Stephen C. K. Chan
14. Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism/Post-Mao- Dengism?, Xiaobin Yang
15. Death of the Poet: Poetry and Society in Contemporary China and Taiwan, Michelle Yeh
Appendix: A Bibliographical Survey of Publications on Chinese Literature from 1949 to 1999, Jeffrey C. Kinkley
