BiblioVault - Books about Chinese Literature

After Mao

Chinese Literature and Society, 1978–1981

Jeffrey C. Kinkley

Harvard University Press, 1985

This is the first book in English to analyze the Chinese literary scene during the post-Mao thaw in government control. The seven contributors originally presented their research at a 1982 international conference at St. John’s University, New York, which was attended by scholars from America, Europe, and Asia, including participants from the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.

The special focus on popular literature—science fiction, love stories, detective fiction—reflects China’s new urban mass culture. These popular genres, plus the new “obscure” poetry, and the short-lived literary magazine Today are examined from an international comparative perspective and from a variety of viewpoints—literary, social, historical, political.

Those social and political realities that help determine what books are on hand in China for people to read are discussed. The final chapter presents data on periodical sales, book sales, library borrowings, and readers’ stated preferences in large cities, with emphasis on Canton. Such investigations into what the Chinese public was writing and reading in the years 1978–1981 throw new light on Chinese social attitudes, ideals, morals, and taste.

[more]

A Guide to Chinese Literature

Wilt L. Idema and Lloyd L. Haft

University of Michigan Press, 1997

For at least three thousand years, literature has played a central role in Chinese culture. Even in the most recent times, literary works and their authors have stood in the spotlight of social and political debates that affected the lives of millions. This great respect for literature, together with China’s long history of writing and printing techniques, has resulted in a vast body of writings from past eras, while present-day literary production is so extensive that even the specialist can hardly keep abreast.

A Guide to Chinese Literature provides a broad sketch of this vast terrain. The book is organized into six parts. The first part provides general readers and students of Chinese culture an overview of six crucial features of Chinese literature from beginnings to the early twentieth century. The remaining five parts present a concise overview of the literature itself, arranged into chronological periods: beginnings to 100 CE; 100–1000; 1000–1875; 1875–1915; and 1915 to the present. The development of the major literary genres is traced in each of these periods.

The hardcover edition concludes with an annotated bibliography of more than 120 pages covering the most relevant studies and translations in English, French, German, and Dutch. The paper edition has a shorter bibliography and is intended for classroom use.

[more]

Masculinity Besieged?

Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century

Xueping Zhong

Duke University Press, 2000

In Masculinity Besieged? Xueping Zhong looks at Chinese literature and films produced during the 1980s to examine male subjectivities in contemporary China. Reading through a feminist psychoanalytic lens, Zhong argues that understanding the nature of male subjectivities as portrayed in literature and film is crucial to understanding China’s ongoing quest for modernity.
Before the 1990s onslaught of popular culture decentered the role of intellectuals within the nation, they had come to embody Chinese masculinity during the previous decade. The focus on masculinity in literature had become unprecedented in scale and the desire for “real men” began to permeate Chinese popular culture, making icons out of Rambo and Takakura Ken. Stories by Zhang Xianliang and Liu Heng portraying male anxiety about masculine sexuality are employed by Zhong to show how “marginal” males negotiate their sexual identities in relation to both women and the state. Looking at writers popular among not only the well-educated but also the working and middle classes, she discusses works by Han Shaogong, Yu Hua, and Wang Shuo and examines instances of self-loathing male voices, particularly as they are articulated in Mo Yan’s well-known work Red Sorghum. In her last chapter Zhong examines “roots literature,” which speaks of the desire to create strong men as a part of the effort to create a geopolitically strong Chinese nation. In an afterword, Zhong situates her study in the context of the 1990s.
This book will be welcomed by scholars of Chinese cultural studies, as well as in literary and gender studies.

[more]

Studies in Chinese Literature

John Lyman Bishop

Harvard University Press

This book consists of eight articles on Chinese literature (six from the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies), most of which have long been out of print. Since they have been generally recognized as basic studies of their respective topics, there was an obvious need to make them conveniently available in a single volume. While in no sense a survey of Chinese literature, the content of the articles ranges from the Six Dynasties period (222–589 AD) to the seventeenth century and includes studies of poetry, prose styles, and colloquial fiction, in some cases providing extensive translations.

[more]