Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm In Search of Chinese Modernity

by Chow, Kai-wing; Hon, Tze-ki; Ip, Hung-yok; Price, Don C.; Chen, Jianhua; Fan, Fa-ti; Gimpel, Denise; Huters, Ted; Lau, Frederick; Murthy, Viren; Stapleton, Kristin; Sun, Lung-kee; Yuezhi, Xiong

• ISBN13: 9780739111222
• ISBN10: 0739111221
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-18
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

When did China make the decisive turn from tradition to modernity? For decades, the received wisdom would have pointed to the May Fourth movement, with its titanic battles between the champions of iconoclasm and the traditionalists and its shift to more populist forms of politics. A growing body of recent research, however, has called into question how decisive the turn was, when it happened, and what relation the resulting modernity bore to the agendas of people who participated. Having thus explicitly or implicitly "decentered" the May Fourth, such research (augmented by contributions in the present volume) leaves us with the task of accounting for the shape Chinese modernity took, as the product of dialogues and debates between, and the interplay of, a variety of actors and trends, both within and without the May Fourth camp. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Commercial Printing and Language Reform
Culture, Capital, and the Temptations of the Imagined Market: The Case of the Commercial Press	p. 27
Canon Formation and Linguistic Turn: Literary Debates in Republican China, 1919-1949	p. 51
Gender and Family
The Theory and Practice of Women's Rights in Late-Qing Shanghai, 1843-1911	p. 71
Exercising Women's Rights: Debates on Physical Culture since the Late Nineteenth Century	p. 95
Generational and Cultural Fissures in the May Fourth Movement: Wu Yu (1872-1949) and the Politics of Family Reform	p. 131
Nation, Science, and Culture
The Politics of Fengjian in Late-Qing and Republican China	p. 151
How Did the Chinese Become Native?: Science and the Search for National Origins in the May Fourth Era	p. 183
Nationalizing Sound on the Verge of Chinese Modernity	p. 209
Modernity and Its Chinese Critics
Buddhism, Literature, and Chinese Modernity: Su Manshu's Imaginings of Love (1911-1916)	p. 229
From Babbitt to "Bai Bide": Interpretations of New Humanism in Xueheng	p. 253
Epilogue
The Other May Fourth: Twilight of the Old Order	p. 271
Bibliography	p. 293
Glossary	p. 319
Index	p. 327
List of Contributors	p. 339
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