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Changing Stories in the Chinese World [Paperback]

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  • Category: Books (Literary Criticism)
  • Author:  Elvin, Mark
  • Author:  Elvin, Mark
  • ISBN-10:  0804730911
  • ISBN-10:  0804730911
  • ISBN-13:  9780804730914
  • ISBN-13:  9780804730914
  • Publisher:  Stanford University Press
  • Publisher:  Stanford University Press
  • Pages:  284
  • Pages:  284
  • Binding:  Paperback
  • Binding:  Paperback
  • Pub Date:  01-May-1997
  • Pub Date:  01-May-1997
  • SKU:  0804730911-11-MPOD
  • SKU:  0804730911-11-MPOD
  • Item ID: 100172258
  • Seller: ShopSpell
  • Ships in: 2 business days
  • Transit time: Up to 5 business days
  • Delivery by: Apr 10 to Apr 12
  • Notes: Brand New Book. Order Now.
This book is an innovative attempt to convey something of how it has felt since the early nineteenth century to be Chinese. It is based on the assumption that people live their lives in stories, or as if they themselves were in storiesstories that are largely a social inheritance but are also in some measure self-created or at least continually adapted, edited, or extended.The author describes and interprets some of the most important stories through which the Chinese have lived their lives in the last two hundred years and their understanding of them. He shows how largely forgotten works of popular literature, novels and poems in particular, can admit the reader to a number of different emotional worlds. Together they suggest that there is no such thing astheChinese story, let alone mind, but rather a historical palimpsest of extraordinary and often internally contradictory complexity.The book begins with an examination of Li Ruzhen'sDestinies of the Flowers in the Mirror,which reveals a microcosm of the educated Chinese world predating major Western influences. Balancing this emphasis on the elite are the poems collected by Zhang Yingchang inOur Dynasty's Bell of Poesy,which portray the universe of peasants, women, artisans, soldiers, and prisoners.A bestseller of the 1930's,Tides in the Human Sea,shows the 'crisis of absurdity' that arises when feelings no longer coincide with inherited patterns of behavior as modernization begins to take hold. Hao Ran'sChildren of the Western Sands,a popular Communist work of the early 1970's, allows us to be drawn into at least a momentary empathy with the idealism of the Maoist faithful.Almost as different as can be imagined isThe Bastard,by Sima Zhongyuan, one of Taiwan's most widely read writers. Its characters interpret the Communist revolution in terms derived from traditional Chinese religion, as a deserved punishment inflicted on the Chinese for the filthy impropriety of their sl£3
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