Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature

"This book examines the cultural and historical dynamics of modern China as manifested in literary and visual texts. By visualizing a network of histories continuously cutting across one another, the book provides a powerful critique of conventional paradigms of modern Chinese literature. It spans from the late nineteenth century to the turn of the new millennium, and it covers a very wide range of issues, from cultural production to gender politics, from national identity to the aesthetics of imagined community and citizenship, from urban ethics to diasporic crisis, and from spatial 'demolition' to visionary 'apocalypse'. The contributors have done most impressive work in making a comprehensive volume on the multifaceted dimensions of Chinese (post)modernity." - David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University "Engaged responsively with yet going far beyond the critical and thematic conventions handed down by the May Fourth tradition, the contributors to this volume raise fundamental questions of conceptualization, definition, archival research, and interpretation that will likely help transform and reshape the field of knowledge known hitherto as 'modern Chinese literature.' Editor Charles Laughlin is to be congratulated on his vision and leadership in this excellent collective endeavor." - Rey Chow, author of Woman and Chinese Modernity and editor of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory "Contested Modernities is a wonderfully diverse collection of essays-ranging in topic from the literature of the Republican era, to post-Mao fiction, theater, and film, to theater and film in Taiwan, to diaspora literature-that will further expand the ever-shifting boundaries of Chinese literary modernity. Some of the essays explicitly question conventional definitions of modern Chinese literature by diagnosing how and why those definitions came to be. Others, by drawing attention to new kinds of content, themes, and characters in recent literature, demonstrate that literary modernity in China is in a constant process of transformation and renewal." - Kirk Denton, The Ohio State University "Constituting what might be called the 'fourth generation' of American intellectuals engaging with 20th-century Chinese literature, these scholars have definitively moved beyond the old canon of modern Chinese writing that informed and determined the work of many of their predecessors. Ranging from introductions of previously marginalized voices to critical re-evaluations of the old mainstream, and demonstrating a keen interest in contemporary developments both inside and beyond the boundaries of China, these essays convincingly demonstrate the contested nature of Chinese modernity, as set out in Charles Laughlin's masterful introduction. This book shows, more than any collection I know, the vitality of modern Chinese literature as a field of study and its relevance to investigations and theories of global culture." - Michel Hockx, SOAS, University of London"This collected volume is a timely and solid contribution to the burgeoning field of modern Chinese literature in North America from a new generation of scholars who are likely to play major roles in the field in the future... [W]e are grateful to all of the book's contributors for these fresh lines of inquiry that are opening new critical horizons, and we owe special thanks to Laughlin for presenting these diverse inquiries in such a thought-provoking and coherent form." - Yibing Huang, Connecticut College

CHARLES LAUGHLIN is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature, Yale University, USA. His previous book, Chinese Reportage:The Aesthetics of Historical Experience, was published by Duke University Press in 2002.

Introduction; C.Laughlin PART 1: REWRITING CULTURAL HISTORY The Rhetorics of Modernity and the Logics of the Fetish; A.Des Forges Feminine Histories: Inventing Tradition in Modern China; M.Ferry Desire and Disease: Bai Wei and the Thirties Literary Left; A.Dooling Remembering the Butterfly: Ye Zhaoyan's Passionate Memory and Fictional History; G.Xu Toward a Theory of Postmodern/Post-Mao-Deng Literature; X.Yang PART 2: DISCOURSIVE COMMUNITIES Reproducing the Self: Consumption, Imaginary, and Identity in Chinese Women's Autobiographical Practice in the 1990s; W.Lingzhen What's Chinese in Chinese Diasporic Literature?; E.Teng Maxine Hong Kingston's Journey across East and West in Tripmaster Monkey; L.Chen PART 3: THE EMERGENCE OF VISUAL CULTURE Lu Xun and Visual Vestiges from the Past; C.Rojas The Dream of Flying: Taipei's Cinematic Poetics of Demolition; Y.Braester The Comedy of Dialogues: Li Guoxiu's Ambiguous Answer to the Taiwan Question; J.Weinstein Boundary-Crossing in The Great Going Abroad; C.Conceison PART 4: THE QUOTIDIAN APOCALYPSE Visions of the Apocalypse in Contemporary Chinese Novels; J.C.Kinkley Post-Mao Urban Fiction and the Ethics of Authenticity; R.Visser Capitalist and Enlightenment Values in 1990s Chinese Fiction; D.Sabina Knight Writing Against Consumer Sexuality in Late Capitalism; T-l.D.Sang