Additional information
by Kang Liu (Editor)
This collection of essays addresses the perception that our understanding of modern China will be enhanced by opening the literature of China to more rigorous theoretical and comparative study. In doing so, the book confronts the problematic and complex subject of China's literary, theoretical, and cultural responses to the experience of the modern.
With chapters by writers, scholars, and critics from mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States, this volume explores the complexity of representing modernity within the Chinese context. Addressing the problem of finding a proper language for articulating fundamental issues in the historical experience of twentieth-century China, the authors critically re-examine notions of realism, the self/subject, and modernity and draw on perspectives from feminist criticism, ideological analysis, and postmodern theory. Among the many topics explored are subjectivity in Chinese cultural theory, Chinese gender relations, the viability of a Lacanian approach to Chinese identity, the politics of subversion in Chinese reportage, and the ambivalent status of the icon of paternity since Mao.
At the same time this book offers a probing look into the transformation that Chinese culture as well as the study of that culture is currently undergoing, it also reconfirms private discourse as an ideal site for an investigation into a real and imaginary, private and collective encounter with history.
Contributors. Liu Kang, Xiaobing Tang, Liu Zaifu, Stephen Chan, Lydia H. Liu, Wendy Larson, Theodore Huters, David Wang, Tonglin Lu, Yingjin Zhang, Yuejin Wang, Li Tuo, Leo Ou-fan Lee
Back Jacket
This present volume, as a whole, abundantly demonstrates that the much talked-about 'paradigm shift' in our field is no longer merely wishful thinking or hot air. It provides us with convincing examples of what some new directions and subjects of investigation may be, and what reading strategies we could apply to old, familiar texts. It is a volume that the next generation of students of modern Chinese literature will have to come to terms with.--Leo Ou-fan Lee, from the Postscript
Author Biography
Liu Kang is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese at Pennsylvania State University. Xiaobing Tang, Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Colorado, has translated Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism and Cultural Theories into Chinese.
