Description
Book SynopsisJones revises our understanding of modern China by tracing the ways that evolutionary works developed into a form of vernacular knowledge in modern Chinese literature. From children’s primers to print culture, from fairy tales to filmmaking, his analysis offers an innovative and interdisciplinary angle of vision on China’s cultural evolution.
Trade ReviewAndrew Jones’s rich and complex genealogy of developmental thinking in modern China is destined to travel far beyond Chinese studies. His imaginative negotiation of the traffic between evolutionary thought and narrative experiments in late Qing and Republican China—with the legendary figure of Lu Xun at the center of his analysis—will speak to larger questions of civilization and belatedness that have typically marked debates on modernity outside of the ‘normative’ West. -- Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
Developmental Fairy Tales is a provocative work that rethinks the meaning of Chinese modernity and post-modernity. By examining the development of ’development’—as trope, discourse, institution, and various forms of cultural production—from the late Qing to the new millennium, it provides a fresh perspective for anyone interested in modern Chinese cultural, intellectual, and literary studies. -- David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University
Andrew Jones masterfully analyzes how notions of the modern in China have been thoroughly invested by an obsession with development. In doing so, he makes new sense out of well-trodden ideas, and the brilliant work of linking them under the overarching theme of ‘development’ knits them together as never before and sheds an innovative light on the intellectual trajectory of twentieth-century China. -- Theodore Huters, University of California, Los Angeles
