Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature [Hardcover]

This book is a significant gathering of ideas on the subject of modern Chinese literature and culture of the past several years. The essays represent a wide spectrum of new approaches and new areas of subject matter that are changing the landscape of knowledge of modern and contemporary Chinese culture: women's literature, theatre (performance), film, graphic arts, popular literature, as well as literature of the Chinese diaspora. These phenomena and the approaches to them manifest interconnected trajectories for new scholarship in the field: the rewriting of literary history, the emergence of visual culture, and the quotidian apocalypse - the displacement of revolutionary romanticism and realism as central paradigms for cultural expression by the perspective of private, everyday experience.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 Capitalil0