Download or read book The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century written by Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1980-12-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays reveals the dynamic role of the late Qing novel in the process of modernization of Chinese fiction. Substantial changes in various aspects of the Chinese novel at the turn of the century, demonstrated by structural analyses of several representative novels, suggest that the evolution of modern Chinese fiction was a more complex process than a simple imitation of Western literatures. The results challenge the scholarly consensus that modern Chinese fiction resulted from a radical change brought about by the May Fourth Movement in 1919. It is demonstrated rather that the transformation had already begun in the first decade of the twentieth century and that the conspicuous changes in Chinese fiction of the 1920s represent a culmination rather than a beginning of the modern evolutionary process. The book consists of nine studies which analyse the late Qing novel in its general and specific aspects. The introduction and first essay explain how social changes conditioned cultural and literary changes during the period and how the resultant new theory of fiction generated new concepts of a politically engaged novel. The two following studies develop a general statement of narrative structures and devices, derived from structural analyses of seven outstanding late Qing novels. The last six articles examine particular novels in detail, focusing on the specific fictional techniques which predominate in each. This is the first volume in a new series, Modern East Asian Studies.
Download or read book Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries written by Patrick Hanan and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has often been said that the nineteenth century was a relatively stagnant period for Chinese fiction, but preeminent scholar Patrick Hanan shows that the opposite is true: the finest novels of the nineteenth century show a constant experimentation and evolution. In this collection of detailed and insightful essays, Hanan examines Chinese fiction before and during the period in which Chinese writers first came into contact with western fiction. Hanan explores the uses made of fiction by westerners in China; the adaptation and integration of western methods in Chinese fiction; and the continued vitality of the Chinese fictional tradition. Some western missionaries, for example, wrote religious novels in Chinese, almost always with the aid of native assistants who tended to change aspects of the work to "fit" Chinese taste. Later, such works as Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," Jonathan Swift's "A Voyage to Lilliput," the novels of Jules Verne, and French detective stories were translated into Chinese. These interventions and their effects are explored here for virtually the first time.
Download or read book Journey to the West 2018 Edition PDF written by Wu Cheng'en and published by Asiapac Books Pte Ltd. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling Journey to the West comic book by artist Chang Boon Kiat is now back in a brand new fully coloured edition. Journey to the West is one of the greatest classics in Chinese literature. It tells the epic tale of the monk Xuanzang who journeys to the West in search of the Buddhist sutras with his disciples, Sun Wukong, Sandy and Pigsy. Along the way, Xuanzang's life was threatened by the diabolical White Bone Spirit, the menacing Red Child and his fearsome parents and, a host of evil spirits who sought to devour Xuanzang's flesh to attain immortality. Bear witness to the formidable Sun Wukong's (Monkey God) prowess as he takes them on, using his Fiery Eyes, Golden Cudgel, Somersault Cloud, and quick wits! Be prepared for a galloping read that will leave you breathless!
Download or read book The Sing Song Girls of Shanghai written by Bangqing Han and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Courtesans, desire & the denizens of the Shanghai underworld are just some of the elements in Han Bangqing's novel of late imperial China, published in 1892 & now available in English for the first time.
Download or read book The Sea of Regret written by Wu Jianren and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1995-07-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published within a few months of each other in 1906, "Stones in the Sea" by Fu Lin and "The Sea of Regret" by Wu Jianren take opposite sides in the heated turn-of-the-century debate over the place of romantic and sexual love and passion in Chinese life. "The Sea of Regret", which came to be the most popular short novel of this period, is a response to the less well-known but equally significant "Stones in the Sea". Taken together, this pair of novels provides a fascinating portrait of early twentieth-century China's struggle with its own cultural, ethical, and sexual redefinition. Patrick Hanan's masterful translation brings together these novels -- neither of which has before been available in any foreign language -- in a single volume, with a valuable introduction and notes. | "A tour de force in the art of translation. 'The Sea of Regret' is not only accurate, but, in the typical Hanan fashion, it is succinct and elegant as well. Impeccable work from an eminent scholar of Chinese fiction and a master of prose." --Lee Ou-fan Lee, UCLA | "These two short novels are especially interesting for their insights into the debate in educated circles concerning marriage, family, and the status of women. The chaos in China caused by the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 is also vividly rendered in both works. Readers will find not only intrinsic interest but also historical relevance in these early modern novels." --Michael S. Duke, University of British Columbia | Patrick Hanan is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of "The Chinese Vernacular Story" and "The Invention of Li Yu" and the translator of "The Carnal Prayer Mat" and "A Tower for the Summer Heat".
Download or read book What Remains written by Tobie Meyer-Fong and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-27 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Taiping Rebellion was one of the costliest civil wars in human history. Many millions of people lost their lives. Yet while the Rebellion has been intensely studied by scholars in China and elsewhere, we still know little of how individuals coped with these cataclysmic events. Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, What Remains explores the issues that preoccupied Chinese and Western survivors. Individuals, families, and communities grappled with fundamental questions of loyalty and loss as they struggled to rebuild shattered cities, bury the dead, and make sense of the horrors that they had witnessed. Driven by compelling accounts of raw emotion and deep injury, What Remains opens a window to a world described by survivors themselves. This book transforms our understanding of China's 19th century and recontextualizes suffering and loss in China during the 20th century.
Download or read book To Live written by Yu Hua and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally banned in China but later named one of that nation’s most influential books, a searing novel that portrays one man’s transformation from the spoiled son of a landlord to a kindhearted peasant. “A work of astounding emotional power.” —Dai Sijie, author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress From the author of Brothers and China in Ten Words: this celebrated contemporary classic of Chinese literature was also adapted for film by Zhang Yimou. After squandering his family’s fortune in gambling dens and brothels, the young, deeply penitent Fugui settles down to do the honest work of a farmer. Forced by the Nationalist Army to leave behind his family, he witnesses the horrors and privations of the Civil War, only to return years later to face a string of hardships brought on by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. Left with an ox as the companion of his final years, Fugui stands as a model of gritty authenticity, buoyed by his appreciation for life in this narrative of humbling power.
Download or read book Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping account of China's nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles--a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China. The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their power from the poor and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of millions of Chinese against their Manchu rulers. This homegrown movement seemed all but unstoppable until Britain and the United States stepped in and threw their support behind the Manchus: after years of massive carnage, all opposition to Qing rule was effectively snuffed out for generations. Stephen R. Platt recounts these events in spellbinding detail, building his story on two fascinating characters with opposing visions for China's future: the conservative Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan, an accidental general who emerged as the most influential military strategist in China's modern history; and Hong Rengan, a brilliant Taiping leader whose grand vision of building a modern, industrial, and pro-Western Chinese state ended in tragic failure. This is an essential and enthralling history of the rise and fall of the movement that, a century and a half ago, might have launched China on an entirely different path into the modern world.
Download or read book Wealth and Power written by Orville Schell and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two leading experts on China evaluate its rise throughout the past one hundred fifty years, sharing portraits of key intellectual and political leaders to explain how China transformed from a country under foreign assault to a world giant.
Download or read book Revolution of the Heart written by Haiyan Lee and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an engagingly written critical genealogy of the idea of "love" in modern Chinese literature, thought, and popular culture. It examines a wide range of texts, including literary, historical, philosophical, anthropological, and popular cultural genres from the late imperial period to the beginning of the socialist era. It traces the process by which love became an all-pervasive subject of representation and discourse, as well as a common language in which modern notions of self, gender, family, sexuality, and nation were imagined and contested. Winner of the Association for Asian Studies 2009 Joseph Levenson Book Prize for the best English-language academic book on post-1900 China
Download or read book Staging the World written by Rebecca E. Karl and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVAn historical analysis of how the Chinese constructed their understandings of their place in the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries./div
Download or read book Licentious Fictions written by Daniel Poch and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-24 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century Japanese literary discourse and narrative developed a striking preoccupation with ninjō—literally “human emotion,” but often used in reference to amorous feeling and erotic desire. For many writers and critics, fiction’s capacity to foster both licentiousness and didactic values stood out as a crucial source of ambivalence. Simultaneously capable of inspiring exemplary behavior and a dangerous force transgressing social norms, ninjō became a focal point for debates about the role of the novel and a key motor propelling narrative plots. In Licentious Fictions, Daniel Poch investigates the significance of ninjō in defining the literary modernity of nineteenth-century Japan. He explores how cultural anxieties about the power of literature in mediating emotions and desire shaped Japanese narrative from the late Edo through the Meiji period. Poch argues that the Meiji novel, instead of superseding earlier discourses and narrative practices surrounding ninjō, complicated them by integrating them into new cultural and literary concepts. He offers close readings of a broad array of late Edo- and Meiji-period narrative and critical sources, examining how they shed light on the great intensification of the concern surrounding ninjō. In addition to proposing a new theoretical outlook on emotion, Licentious Fictions challenges the divide between early modern and modern Japanese literary studies by conceptualizing the nineteenth century as a continuous literary-historical space.
Download or read book The Columbia History of Chinese Literature written by Victor H. Mair and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 1369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Columbia History of Chinese Literature is a comprehensive yet portable guide to China's vast literary traditions. Stretching from earliest times to the present, the text features original contributions by leading specialists working in all genres and periods. Chapters cover poetry, prose, fiction, and drama, and consider such contextual subjects as popular culture, the impact of religion, the role of women, and China's relationship with non-Sinitic languages and peoples. Opening with a major section on the linguistic and intellectual foundations of Chinese literature, the anthology traces the development of forms and movements over time, along with critical trends, and pays particular attention to the premodern canon.
Download or read book The Magic of Concepts written by Rebecca E. Karl and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Magic of Concepts Rebecca E. Karl interrogates "the economic" as concept and practice as it was construed historically in China in the 1930s and again in the 1980s and 1990s. Separated by the Chinese Revolution and Mao's socialist experiments, each era witnessed urgent discussions about how to think about economic concepts derived from capitalism in modern China. Both eras were highly cosmopolitan and each faced its own global crisis in economic and historical philosophy: in the 1930s, capitalism's failures suggested that socialism offered a plausible solution, while the abandonment of socialism five decades later provoked a rethinking of the relationship between history and the economic as social practice. Interweaving a critical historiography of modern China with the work of the Marxist-trained economist Wang Yanan, Karl shows how "magical concepts" based on dehistoricized Eurocentric and capitalist conceptions of historical activity that purport to exist outside lived experiences have erased much of the critical import of China's twentieth-century history. In this volume, Karl retrieves the economic to argue for a more nuanced and critical account of twentieth-century Chinese and global historical practice.
Download or read book Kingdom of Characters Pulitzer Prize Finalist written by Jing Tsu and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.
Download or read book Fin de Si cle Splendor written by Dewei Wang and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reigning view of literary historians has been that the May Fourth movement of 1919 marks the division between the traditional and the modern in Chinese literature. This book argues that signs of reform and innovation can be discerned long before May Fourth, and that as China entered the arena of modern, international history in the late Qing, it was already developing its own complex matrix of incipient modernities. It demonstrates that late Qing fiction nurtured a creative, innovative poetics, one that was spurned by the reformers of the May Fourth generation in favor of Western-style realism. The author recognizes that a full account of modern Chinese fiction needs to ask why so many genres, styles, themes, and figures found in late imperial fiction were repressed by "modern" Chinese literary discourse. He focuses on four genres of late Qing fiction that have been either rudely dismissed in pejorative terms or simply ignored: depravity romances, court-case and chivalric cycles, grotesque exposés, and scientific fantasies. The author shows that in spite of the realist orthodoxy that has dominated Chinese literature since the May Fourth movement, these unwelcome genres have continually found their way back into mainstream discourse, their influence being increasingly evident in recent decades. This first comprehensive study of late Qing fiction discusses more than sixty works, at least half of which have rarely or never been dealt with by Western or Chinese scholars. Richly informed by contemporary literary theory, this book constitutes a polemical rethinking of the nature of Chinese literary and cultural modernity.
Download or read book The Twentieth Century written by Albert Robida and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-17 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humorous, illustrated novel by the “father of science fiction illustration”.
