Download or read book Perfect Worlds written by Douwe Wessel Fokkema and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Perfect Worlds offers an extensive historical analysis of utopian narratives in the Chinese and Euro-American traditions. This comparative study discusses, among other things, More's criticism of Plato, the European orientalist search for utopia in China, Wells's Modern Utopia and his talk with Stalin, Chinese writers constructing their Confucianist utopia, traces of Daoism in Mao Zedong's utopianism and politics and finally the rise of dystopian writing - a negative expression of the utopian impulse - in Europe and America as well as in China"--P. 4 of cover.
Download or read book Utopian Fiction in China written by Shuk Man Leung and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike previous studies that have examined the late Qing utopian imagination as an ahistorical motif, a literary theme, and a translation phenomenon, in this book Shuk Man Leung considers utopian fiction as a knowledge apparatus that helped develop Chinese nationalism and modernity. Based on untapped primary sources in Chinese, English, and Japanese, her research reveals how utopian imagination, blooming after Liang Qichao’s publication of The Future of New China, served as a tool of knowledge formation and dissemination that transformed China’s public sphere and catalysed historical change. Embracing interdisciplinary approach from genre studies, studies on modern Chinese newspapers and intellectual history, this book provides an analysis of the development of utopian literary practices, epistemic meanings, and fictional narratives and the interactions between traditional and imported knowledge that helped shape the discourse in early 20th century China.
Download or read book Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context written by David Der-wei Wang and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-05 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context: Texts, Ideas, Spaces decisively demonstrates the extent to which utopianism has shaped political thought, cultural imaginaries, and social engagement after it was introduced into the Chinese context in the nineteenth century. In fact, pursuit of utopia has often led to action—such as the Chinese Revolution and the Umbrella Movement—and contested consequences. Covering a time span that goes from the late Qing to our days, the authors show that few ideas have been as influencing as utopia, which has compellingly shaped the imaginaries that underpin China’s historical change. Utopianism contributed to the formation of the Chinese state itself—shaping the thought of key figures of the late Qing and early Republican eras such as Kang Youwei and Sun Yat-sen—and outlived the labyrinthine debates of the second half of the twentieth century, both under Mao’s rule and during the post-socialist era. Even in the current times of dystopian narratives, a period in which utopia seems to be less influential than in the past, its manifestations persistently provide lifelines against fatalism or cynicism. This collection shows how profoundly utopian ideas have nurtured both the thought of crucial figures during these historical times, the new generation of mainland Chinese and Sinophone intellectuals, and the hopes of twenty-first-century Hong Kong activists. “Wang, Leung, and Zhang’s collection is a timely contribution to utopian studies built on consistent, coherent, boundary-crossing approaches. Interdisciplinary in its very sense, the essays bring intellectual history, literary studies, philosophy, and political theories together in dialogue. Of particular note are the essays that situate Hong Kong in a literary tradition that connects China, Hong Kong, and the beyond.” —Mingwei Song, Wellesley College “Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context is an impressive intellectual undertaking. The essays are highly engaging and offer powerful, multi-faceted approaches to utopianism in contemporary Chinese thought and practice. Stimulating and informative, the book as a whole addresses the dynamic interplay between the utopian and dystopian, thereby inspiring clarity in political thought and action in the present moment.” —Robin Visser, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Download or read book Visions of Dystopia in China s New Historical Novels written by Jeffrey C. Kinkley and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The depiction of personal and collective suffering in modern Chinese novels differs significantly from standard Communist accounts and many Eastern and Western historical narratives. Writers such as Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Ge Fei, Li Rui, and Zhang Wei skew and scramble common conceptions of China's modern development, deploying avant-garde narrative techniques from Latin American and Euro-American modernism to project a surprisingly "un-Chinese" dystopian vision and critical view of human culture and ethics. The epic narratives of modern Chinese fiction make rich use of magical realism, surrealism, and unusual treatments of historical time. Also featuring graphic depictions of sex and violence, as well as dark, raunchy comedy, these novels reflect China's recent history re-presenting the overthrow of the monarchy in the early twentieth century and the resulting chaos of revolution and war; the recurring miseries perpetrated by class warfare during the dictatorship of Mao Zedong; and the social dislocations caused by China's industrialization and rise as a global power. This book casts China's highbrow historical novels from the late 1980s to the first decade of the twenty-first century as a distinctively Chinese contribution to the form of the global dystopian novel and, consequently, to global thinking about the interrelations of utopia and dystopia.
Download or read book The Reincarnated Giant written by Mingwei Song and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new wave of Chinese science fiction is here. This golden age has not only resurrected the genre but also subverted its own conventions. Going beyond political utopianism and technological optimism, contemporary Chinese writers conjure glittering visions and subversive experiments—ranging from space opera to cyberpunk, utopianism to the posthuman, and parodies of China’s rise to deconstructions of the myth of national development. This anthology showcases the best of contemporary science fiction from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China. In fifteen short stories and novel excerpts, The Reincarnated Giant opens a doorway into imaginary realms alongside our own world and the history of the future. Authors such as Lo Yi-chin, Dung Kai-cheung, Han Song, Chen Qiufan, and the Hugo winner Liu Cixin—some alive during the Cultural Revolution, others born in the 1980s—blur the boundaries between realism and surrealism, between politics and technology. They tell tales of intergalactic war; decoding the last message sent from an extinct human race; the use of dreams as tools to differentiate cyborgs and humans; poets’ strange afterlife inside a supercomputer; cannibalism aboard an airplane; and unchecked development that leads to uncontrollable catastrophe. At a time when the Chinese government promotes the “Chinese dream,” the dark side of the new wave shows a nightmarish unconscious. The Reincarnated Giant is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of the genre.
Download or read book Chinese and Western Literary Influence in Liu Cixin s Three Body Trilogy written by Will Peyton and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-07-30 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese and Western Literary Influence in Liu Cixin’s Three Body Trilogy examines Liu Cixin’s acclaimed trilogy, a Chinese science fiction epic whose translation is exceedingly popular in the Western world. Will Peyton argues that the ingenuity of Liu’s writing is found in its conscious engagement with translated Western fiction rather than, as one might expect, in Chinese language science fiction of the past. The book illustrates how contemporary Chinese fiction, since the economic opening of China in the late 1980s, is deeply and complexly influenced by various strains in Western literary and intellectual thought, an area that scholars of Chinese literature have tended to neglect. Providing a lucid and succinct close-reading and textual analysis of Three Body trilogy, the book also makes reference to broader ideas and themes in modern Chinese and Western intellectual history.
Download or read book Tales of Futures Past written by Paola Iovene and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation building, and with the utopian visions broadcast by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future is thus understood as a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces "anticipation"—the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds—as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture from the 1950s to 2011. In doing so, Paola Iovene connects the emergence of new literary genres with changing visions of the future in contemporary China. This book provides a nuanced and dynamic account of the relationship between state discourses, market pressures, and individual writers and texts. It stresses authors' and editors' efforts to redefine what constitutes literature under changing political and economic circumstances. Engaging with questions of translation, temporality, formation of genres, and stylistic change, Iovene mines Chinese science fiction and popular science, puts forward a new interpretation of familiar Chinese avant-garde fiction, and offers close readings of texts that have not yet received any attention in English-language scholarship. Far-ranging in its chronological scope and impressive in its interdisciplinary approach, this book rethinks the legacies of socialism in postsocialist Chinese literary modernity.
Download or read book Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias written by Qingyun Wu and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Qingyun Wu's work is a unique discovery in literary studies in the West. Chinese utopian literature paired with its English counterparts form an original and valuable contribution to world literature. In widely varying historical and cultural texts that span the last five centuries, Wu analyzes the theme of female rule, including a critique of patriarchy and emphasizing a vision for women. To date, Chinese utopias have been insufficiently explored and unavailable to Western scholars. Wu's theories of the politics of female rule, as seen in Chinese and English literature since the end of the sixteenth century, are predicated on three significant changes that have taken place during those periods. These include an outright rejection of rule by women to rule by women in the guise of men, from individual to collective female rule, and from an idealized matrilineality to anarchism by the female principle. Works examined include Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Luo Maodeng's Sanbao's Expedition to the Western Ocean, Florence Dixie's Gloriana, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Chen Duansheng's The Destiny of the Next Life, Li Ruzhen's The Flowers in the Mirror, and Bai Hua's The Remote Country of Women. This critical view of the development of feminist utopias in both the East and West will be of interest to scholars of women's studies, political science, and anthropology as well as to those in literature for both the classical and modern periods.
Download or read book Looking Backward 2000 1887 written by Edward Bellamy and published by . This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1887. According to Erich Fromm, Looking Backward is "one of the most remarkable books ever published in America".
Download or read book Perfect Worlds written by Douwe Wessel Fokkema and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Perfect Worlds offers an extensive historical analysis of utopian narratives in the Chinese and Euro-American traditions. This comparative study discusses, among other things, More's criticism of Plato, the European orientalist search for utopia in China, Wells's Modern Utopia and his talk with Stalin, Chinese writers constructing their Confucianist utopia, traces of Daoism in Mao Zedong's utopianism and politics and finally the rise of dystopian writing - a negative expression of the utopian impulse - in Europe and America as well as in China"--P. 4 of cover.
Download or read book Chairman Mao Would Not be Amused written by Howard Goldblatt and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty stories by Chinese writers as they break free of the grip of uniformity which held them for over four decades. The stories include Can Xue's The Summons, on the last days of a murderer, Su Tong's The Brothers Shu, on male rivalry for a woman, and A String of Choices, which is a satirical look at Chinese health care by Wang Meng, a deposed minister of culture.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature written by Gregory Claeys and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a combination of historical and thematic approaches, this volume engages with the fascinating and complex genre of utopian literature.
Download or read book China Dream written by Ma Jian and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending fact and fiction, this darkly comic fable “may be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party’s moral failings” (Mike Ives, The New York Times). Called “Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!" by Margaret Atwood on Twitter, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode's nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future. Exposing the damage inflicted on a nation's soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth, China Dream is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state–imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.
Download or read book The Fat Years written by Chan Koonchung and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Banned in China, this controversial and politically charged novel tells the story of the search for an entire month erased from official Chinese history. Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one could care less—except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that have possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn—not only about their leaders, but also about their own people—stuns them to the core. It is a message that will astound the world. A kind of Brave New World reflecting the China of our times, The Fat Years is a complex novel of ideas that reveals all too chillingly the machinations of the postmodern totalitarian state, and sets in sharp relief the importance of remembering the past to protect the future.
Download or read book The Edge of Knowing written by Roy Bing Chan and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the historical impact of dream rhetoric on Chinese modernity and nation-building Realism and the rhetoric of dreams intersected in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period just following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The Edge of Knowing investigates this relationship, showing how writers’ attention to dreams demonstrates the multiple influences of Western psychology, utopian desire for revolutionary change, and the enduring legacy of traditional Chinese philosophy. At the same time, modern Chinese writers used their work to represent social reality for the purpose of nation building. Recent political usage of dream rhetoric in the People’s Republic of China attests to the continuing influence of dreams on the imagination of Chinese modernity. By employing a number of critical perspectives, The Edge of Knowing will appeal to readers seeking to understand the complicated relationship between literary form and Chinese history and politics.
Download or read book Literature written by David Damrosch and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-06-20 with total page 1789 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LITERATURE A WORLD HISTORY An exploration of the history of the world’s literatures and the many varieties of literary expression Literature: A World Historyencompasses all the world’s major literary traditions, emphasizing the interrelationship of local and national cultures over time. Spanning global literature from the beginnings of recorded history to the present day, this expansive four-volume set examines the many varieties of the world’s literatures in their social and intellectual contexts. Its four volumes are devoted to literature before 200 CE, from 200 to 1500, from 1500 to 1800, and from 1800 to 2000, with four dozen contributors providing new insights into the art of literature, and addressing the situation of literature in the world today. Organized throughout in six broad regions—Africa, the Americas, East Asia, Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, and West and Central Asia—Literature: A World History offers readers a clear and consistent treatment of diverse forms of literary expression across time and place. Throughout the text, particular emphasis is placed on literary institutions within different regional and linguistic cultures and on the relations between literature and a spectrum of social, political, and religious contexts. Features work by an international panel of leading scholars from around the globe, in Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, and the United States Provides a balanced overview of national and global literature from all major regions of the world from antiquity to the present Highlights the specificity of regional and local cultures throughout much of literary history, together with cross-cutting essays on topics such as different writing systems, court cultures, and utopias Literature: A World History is an invaluable reference work for undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars looking for a wide-ranging overview of global literary history.
Download or read book Hundred Days Literature written by Lorenzo Andolfatto and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hundred Days’ Literature, Lorenzo Andolfatto explores the landscape of early modern Chinese fiction through the lens of the utopian novel, casting new light on some of its most peculiar yet often overshadowed literary specimens. The wutuobang or lixiang xiaoshuo, by virtue of its ideally totalizing perspective, provides a one-of-a-kind critical tool for the understanding of late imperial China’s fragmented Zeitgeist. Building upon rigorous close reading and solid theoretical foundations, Hundred Days’ Literature offers the reader a transcultural critical itinerary that links Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward to Wu Jianren’s Xin Shitou ji via the writings of Liang Qichao, Chen Tianhua, Bihe Guanzhuren, and Lu Shi’e. The book also includes the first English translation of Cai Yuanpei’s short story “New Year’s Dream.”
