Download or read book Mei Niang s Long Lost First Writings written by Norman Smith and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-09 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1944, the novel Xie (Crabs) by Mei Niang (1916-2013) was honored with the Japanese Empire’s highest literary award, Novel of the Year. Then, at the peak of her popularity, Mei Niang published in Japanese-owned, Chinese-language journals and newspapers in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (1932-1945), Japan, and north China. Contemporaries lauded her writings, especially for introducing liberalism to Manchuria’s literary world. In Maoist China, however, Mei Niang was condemned as a traitor and a Rightist with her life and career torn to shreds until her formal vindication in the late 1970s. In 1997, Mei Niang was named one of "Modern China's 100 Writers." The collection that is translated in this volume, Xiaojie ji (Young lady’s collection), was published in 1936, when she was 19 years old. Long thought forever lost in the violence of China’s civil war and Maoist strife, the collection was only re-discovered in 2019. This is the first book-length, English-language translation of the work of this high-profile, prolific New Woman writer from Northeast China. Mei Niang’s Long-Lost First Writings will appeal to those interested in Chinese literature, the Japanese Empire, historic fiction, history, women’s/gender history, and students in undergraduate and graduate level courses. To date, English-language volumes of translated Chinese literature have rarely focused on Manchukuo’s Chinese writers or centered on those who left the puppet state by1935. This volume fills an important historical lacuna – a teenaged Chinese woman’s views of life and literature in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.

Download or read book The Limits of Realism written by Marston Anderson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-07-26 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese intellectuals of the early twentieth century were attracted to realism primarily as a tool for social regeneration. Realism encouraged writers to adopt the stance of the independent cultural critic and drew into the compass of serious literature the disenfranchised "others" of Chinese society. As historical pressures forced new ideological commitments in the late twenties and thirties, however, writers grew suspicious both of the "individualism" implicit in the realist model and of the often superficial nature of the sympathies that their fiction evoked in the middle class. Anderson argues that realism must be defined negatively as a "discourse of limitations" and is of minimal utility in the Chinese search for political and cultural empowerment. He shows how hesitations about the realist model affect the fiction of four representative authors, Lu Xun, Ye Shaojun, Mao Dun, and Zhang Tianyi. He also considers the demise of critical realism in the face of a new collectivist understanding of Chinese reality. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Download or read book The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity written by Charles A. Laughlin and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-03-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chinese essay is arguably China’s most distinctive contribution to modern world literature, and the period of its greatest influence and popularity—the mid-1930s—is the central concern of this book. What Charles Laughlin terms "the literature of leisure" is a modern literary response to the cultural past that manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of short, informal essay writing (xiaopin wen). Laughlin examines the essay both as a widely practiced and influential genre of literary expression and as an important counter-discourse to the revolutionary tradition of New Literature (especially realistic fiction), often viewed as the dominant mode of literature at the time. After articulating the relationship between the premodern traditions of leisure literature and the modern essay, Laughlin treats the various essay styles representing different groups of writers. Each is characterized according to a single defining activity: "wandering" in the case of the Yu si (Threads of Conversation) group surrounding Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren; "learning" with the White Horse Lake group of Zhejiang schoolteachers like Feng Zikai and Xia Mianzun; "enjoying" in the case of Lin Yutang’s Analects group; "dreaming" with the Beijing school. The concluding chapter outlines the impact of leisure literature on Chinese culture up to the present day. The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity dramatizes the vast importance and unique nature of creative nonfiction prose writing in modern China. It will be eagerly read by those with an interest in twentieth-century Chinese literature, modern China, and East Asian or world literatures.

Download or read book Empire of Texts in Motion written by Karen Laura Thornber and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.

Download or read book On the Margins of Modernism written by Christopher Rosenmeier and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces popular 1940s Chinese authors and explores their influence on Chinese literature Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), but although they were an integral part of the Chinese literary scene their bestselling fiction has been given scant attention in histories of Chinese writing. This groundbreaking book, the first book-lenghth study of Xu Xu and Wumingshi in English or any other western language, re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940s. With in-depth analyses of their innovative short stories and novels, Christopher Rosenmeier demonstrates how these important writers incorporated and adapted narrative techniques from Shanghai modernist writers like Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, contesting the view that modernism had little lasting impact in China and firmly positioning these two figures within the literature of their times.Fills a gap in Chinese literary historyFocuses on two of the most popular Chinese authors of the 1940sDevelops a wider argument about the influence of Shanghai modernism on Chinese wartime literature

Download or read book Passivity Resistance and Collaboration written by Poshek Fu and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the intellectual life of Shanghai under occupation, Fu describes Chinese responses to the Japanese Occupation of 1937-45

Download or read book The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama written by Xiaomei Chen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 1216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first of its kind in English, this anthology translates twenty-two popular Chinese plays published between 1919 and 2000, accompanied by a critical introduction to the historical, cultural, and aesthetic evolution of twentieth-century Chinese spoken drama. Primarily comprising works from the People's Republic of China, though including representative plays from Hong Kong and Taiwan, this collection not only showcases the revolutionary rethinking of Chinese theater and performance that began in the late Qing dynasty. It also highlights the formation of Chinese national and gender identities during a period of tremendous social and political change, along with the genesis of contemporary attitudes toward the West. Early twentieth-century Chinese drama embodies the uncertainty and anxiety brought on by modernism, socialism, political conflict, and war. After 1949, PRC theater painted a complex portrait of the rise of communism in China, with the ideals of Chinese socialism juxtaposed against the sacrifices made for a new society. The Cultural Revolution promoted a "model theater" cultivated from the achievements of earlier, leftist spoken drama, even though this theater arose from the destruction of old culture. Post-Mao drama addresses the socialist legacy and the attempts of a wounded nation to reexamine its cultural roots. Taiwan's spoken drama synthesizes regional and foreign traditions, and Hong Kong's spoken drama sparkles as a hybrid of Chinese and Western influences. Immensely valuable for cross-disciplinary, comparative, and performance study, this anthology provides essential perspective on China's theatricality and representation of political life.

Download or read book Selective Guide to Chinese Literature 1900 1949 Volume 3 Poem written by Haft and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-07-24 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Women s Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China written by A. Dooling and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-02-18 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a critical inquiry into the connections between emergent feminist ideologies in China and the production of 'modern' women's writing from the demise of the last imperial dynasty to the founding of the PRC. It accentuates both well-known and under-represented literary voices who intervened in the gender debates of their generation as well as contextualises the strategies used in imagining alternative stories of female experience and potential. It asks two questions: first, how did the advent of enlightened views of gender relations and sexuality influence literary practices of 'new women' in terms of narrative forms and strategies, readership, and publication venues? Second, how do these representations attest to the way these female intellectuals engaged and expanded social and political concerns from the personal to the national?

Download or read book Translingual Narration written by Bert Mittchell Scruggs and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translingual Narration is a study of colonial Taiwanese fiction, its translation from Japanese to Chinese, and films produced during and about the colonial era. It is a postcolonial intervention into a field largely dominated by studies of colonial Taiwanese writing as either a branch of Chinese fiction or part of a larger empire of Japanese language texts. Rather than read Taiwanese fiction as simply belonging to one of two discourses, Bert Scruggs argues for disengaging the nation from the former colony to better understand colonial Taiwan and its postcolonial critics. Following early chapters on the identity politics behind Chinese translations of Japanese texts, attempts to establish a vernacular Taiwanese literature, and critical space, Scruggs provides close readings of short fiction through the critical prisms of locative and cultural or ethnic identity to suggest that cultural identity is evidence of free will. Stories and novellas are also viewed through the critical prism of class-consciousness, including the writings of Yang Kui (1906–1985), who unlike most of his contemporaries wrote politically engaged literature. Scruggs completes his core examination of identity by reading short fiction through the prism of gender identity and posits a resemblance between gender politics in colonial Taiwan and pre-independence India. The work goes on to test the limits of nostalgia and solastalgia in fiction and film by looking at how both the colonial future and past are remembered before concluding with political uses of cinematic murder. Films considered in this chapter include colonial-era government propaganda documentaries and postcolonial representations of colonial cosmopolitanism and oppression. Finally, ideas borrowed from translation and memory studies as well as indigenization are suggested as possible avenues of discovery for continued interventions into the study of postcolonial and colonial Taiwanese fiction and culture. With its insightful and informed analysis of the diverse nature of Taiwanese identity, Translingual Narration will engage a broad audience with interests in East Asian and postcolonial literature, film, history, and culture.

Download or read book Selective Guide to Chinese Literature 1900 1949 Volume 4 Drama written by Eberstein and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-07-24 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of the Selective Guide is to facilitate the first stage of research for those interested in Chinese literature between 1900 and 1949. It provides the reader with basic information on more than 300 words by Chinese writers. The contributions are based on independent research of sinologists from numerous countries. The guide consists of four volumes, which deal with the novel, the short story, the poem, and the drama (the current volume) respectively. Each volume contains an introduction which surveys the development of the particular genre and its characteristics in the period covered. All entries contain bibliographical information, summary of content and appraisal of the work as well as references to secondary sources and translations.

Download or read book Modernism and the Nativist Resistance written by Sung-sheng Chang and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993-07-28 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive English-language study of literary trends in the fiction of Taiwan over the last forty years, this pioneering work explores a rich tradition of literary Modernism in its shifting relationship with Chinese politics and culture. Situating her subject in its historical context, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang traces the connection between Taiwan's Modernists and the liberal scholars of pre-Communist China. She discusses the Modernists' ambivalent relationship with contemporary Taiwan's conservative culture, and provides a detailed critical survey of the strife between the Modernists and the socialistically inclined, anti-Western Nativists. Chang's approach is comprehensive, combining Chinese and comparative perspectives. Employing the critical insights of Raymond Williams, Peter Burger, M. M. Bahktin, and Fredric Jameson, she investigates the complex issues involved in Chinese writers' appropriation of avant-gardism, aestheticism, and various other Western literary concepts and techniques. Within this framework, Chang offers original, challenging interpretations of major works by the best-known Chinese Modernists from Taiwan. As an intensive introduction to a literature of considerable quality and impact, and as a case study of the global spread of Western literary Modernism, this book will be of great interest to students of Chinese and comparative literature, and to those who wish to understand the broad patterns of twentieth-century literary history.

Download or read book The Uses of Literature written by Perry Link and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people in socialist China read and write literary works? Earlier studies in Western Sinology have approached Chinese texts from the socialist era as portraits of society, as keys to the tug-of-war of dissent, or, more recently, as pursuit of "pure art." The Uses of Literature looks broadly and empirically at these and many other "uses" of literature from the points of view of authors, editors, political authorities, and several kinds of readers. Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing, considers texts ranging from elite "misty" poetry to underground hand-copied volumes (shouchauben) and shows in concrete detail how people who were involved with literature sought to teach, learn, enjoy, explore, debate, lead, control, and resist. Using the late 1970s and early 1980s as an entree to the workings of China's "socialist literary system," the author shows how that system held sway from 1950 until around 1990, when an encroaching market economy gradually but fundamentally changed it. In addition to providing a definitive overview of how the socialist Chinese literary system worked, Link offers comparisons to the similar system in the Soviet Union. In the final chapter, the book seeks to explain how the word "good" was used and understood when applied to literary works in such systems. Combining aspects of cultural and literary studies, The Uses of Literature will reward anyone interested in the literature of modern China or how creativity is affected by a "socialist literary system."

Download or read book Forgotten Ally written by Rana Mitter and published by HMH. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the Chinese experience in WWII, named a Book of the Year by both the Economist and the Financial Times: “Superb” (The New York Times Book Review). In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very survival. In this book, prize-winning historian Rana Mitter unfurls China’s drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter, and political intrigue as never before. Based on groundbreaking research, this gripping narrative focuses on a handful of unforgettable characters, including Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and Chiang’s American chief of staff, “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell—and also recounts the sacrifice and resilience of everyday Chinese people through the horrors of bombings, famines, and the infamous Rape of Nanking. More than any other twentieth-century event, World War II was crucial in shaping China’s worldview, making Forgotten Ally both a definitive work of history and an indispensable guide to today’s China and its relationship with the West.

Download or read book Dai Wangshu written by Gregory Lee and published by Chinese University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature written by Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1988 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Iconographies of Occupation written by Jeremy E. Taylor and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-02-28 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iconographies of Occupation is the first book to address how the “collaborationist” Reorganized National Government (RNG) in Japanese-occupied China sought to visualize its leader, Wang Jingwei (1883–1944); the Chinese people; and China itself. It explores the ways in which this administration sought to present itself to the people over which it ruled at different points between 1939, when the RNG was first being formulated, and August 1945, when it folded itself out of existence. What sorts of visual tropes were used in regime iconography and how were these used? What can the intertextual movement of visual tropes and motifs tell us about RNG artists and intellectuals and their understanding of the occupation and the war? Drawing on rarely before used archival records relating to propaganda and a range of visual media produced in occupied China by the RNG, the book examines the means used by this “client regime” to carve out a separate visual space for itself by reviving prewar Chinese methods of iconography and by adopting techniques, symbols, and visual tropes from the occupying Japanese and their allies. Ultimately, however, the “occupied gaze” that was developed by Wang’s administration was undermined by its ultimate reliance on Japanese acquiescence for survival. In the continually shifting and fragmented iconographies that the RNG developed over the course of its short existence, we find an administration that was never completely in control of its own fate—or its message. Iconographies of Occupation presents a thoroughly original visual history approach to the study of a much-maligned regime and opens up new ways of understanding its place in wartime China. It also brings China under the RNG into dialogue with broader theoretical debates about the significance of “the visual” in the cultural politics of foreign occupation.