Han Shaogong and the Roots of Chinese Literature: Exploring the Fantastic and Regional Space in the Context of Modern History (original) (raw)
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This paper explores how Ha Jin’s English fictions provide us with a platform to rethink modern Chinese literature in the global context. His fictions on Chinese experiences call us to imagine a new notion of national literature. Ha Jin may not only subvert the national framework of literary studies and challenge the assumption that a literary text exists in stable or consistently identifiable form, but also urge us to rethink the coherence of modern Chinese literature in the broadest sense. The paper asks, through the case of Ha Jin, if a literary work written in another language be called “Chinese” or “national” in the age of globalization or flexible accumulation, and if literature can go beyond the ethnic-based model of identity. In modern tradition, literature always functions as the imaginary realm for the construction of the nation-state and narrates the shared experiences by a common language. But a more internationally involved China should be more receptive to the changing ...
A History of Chinese Literature
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In this volume, "Chinese Literature," you will meet great minds among the Chinese literates. Since reading is a form of pleasure that has been enjoyed for thousands of years, literature gives us the opportunity to meet great writers in Chinese history who have distilled their thoughts on life and society. This book will track the development of literature from the pre-Qin Dynasty era to the last monarchal regime, the Qing Dynasty.
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This anthology of highly polished, previously published papers directly challenges the canonized status of China's twentieth-century works, authors, and audiences. McDougall presents a consistent, singularly harsh, but simultaneously subtle and convincing argument for a critical approach to modern Chinese literature that emphasizes the demystification of the process by which authors, their works, and the modern Chinese literary field in general are constructed. Refreshingly without recourse to literary-critical jargon, McDougall methodically reveals the politics of power and institution operating in symbiosis with self-censorship and Western sinological study to obscure truths about modern Chinese literature. She demonstrates that the resulting valorization of mediocre literary products and authors is a product of the Chinese intellectual's obsession with his own marginalizationhis fall from privileged social status and power in a post-civil examination China. The construction of modern Chinese literature studies thus resulted in a "fictional [canonized] author" and an "imaginary [canonized] audience" that served to buttress the tenuous legitimacy of the very producers and consumers of the new literature since the May Fourth period. This theme provides the canvas that McDougall uses as she courageously interprets the broad-ranging issues in modern Chinese literature, including its fundamental validity and direction. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, "Authors, Audiences and Critics," examines "the role that critics and scholars in Western countries have played in the formation of the modern Chinese literary canon" (p. 8). Moreover, locating
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One of the most original modern Chinese writers, Shen Congwen is best known for his “native‐soil” stories set in his hometown region of West Hunan. There is, however, an international dimension to Shen's literary regionalism in terms of influence and inspiration. More important, if Shen Congwen deserves a fellowship with other prominent writers of local‐color fiction in the realm of world literature, it would be owing less to the regional and social issues he writes about than to the innovative ways he modernizes traditional Chinese aesthetics to push his literary exploration of these issues from the geographical frontier to the frontier of the human psyche. The fact that Shen gives psychologically complex leading roles to rural characters and those from the lower classes of society makes his writing all the more subversive.