Review of Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965. Chinese Literature and Thought Today 54.3-4 (2024): 160-162 (original) (raw)

Modernity, as most students of literature may anticipate, is strongly associated with urban culture. The field of modern Chinese studies has indeed experienced an urban turn in its increased attention to urban and modern sensibilities, as evidenced by the outpouring of studies on such Shanghai writers as Eileen Chang. When rural China does come into the picture, it typically emerges as case studies in anthropology and sociology. Yu Zhang begs the differ. In her illuminating study, Zhang deftly traces cultural representations of “going to the countryside as a distinctively modern experience in China between 1915 and 1965” across the 1949 divide in order to bring “the rural back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies." This is not only a compelling thesis but also an important contribution to modern Chinese literary and cultural studies.