Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature

by Laughlin, Charles A.

• ISBN13: 9781403967824
• ISBN10: 1403967822
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-04
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Contested Modernities brings together the work of twelve scholars of modern Chinese culture which, from a multiplicity of perspectives, interrogates the myth of modern Chinese culture as a belated or diluted form of the Western experience of modernity. Articles on fiction, drama, film and literary historiography throughout the twentieth century are organized into sections on Rewriting Literary History, The Quotidian Apocalypse and The Moral Subject under Global Capitalism. From the intersecting angles of historical retrospect, shifting historical consciousness, and moral imagination, all show how Chinese cultural producers continue to carve out their own modernisms, neither essentially Chinese nor simply Western.

Author Biography

Charles A. Laughlin is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature, Yale University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Notes on Contributors	ix
Introduction: Contested Modernities	1	(14)
Part I Rewriting Literary History	15	(84)
The Rhetorics of Modernity and the Logics of the Fetish	17	(16)
Alexander Des Forges
Woman and Her Affinity to Literature: Defining Women Writers' Roles in China's Cultural Modernity	33	(18)
Megan M. Ferry
Desire and Disease: Bai Wei and the Literary Left of the 1930s	51	(10)
Amy D. Dooling
What's ``Chinese'' in Chinese Diasporic Literature?	61	(20)
Emma J. Teng
Toward a Theory of Postmodern/Post-Mao--Deng Literature	81	(18)
Xiaobin Yang
Part II The Quotidian Apocalypse	99	(72)
Modernity and Apocalypse in Chinese Novels from the End of the Twentieth Century	101	(20)
Jeffrey C. Kinkley
A Cruel World: Boundary-Crossing and Exile in The Great Going Abroad	121	(20)
Claire Conceison
Stay or Go: Li Guoxiu's Ambiguous Answer to the Taiwan Question	141	(16)
John B. Weinstein
Tales of a Porous City: Public Residences and Private Streets in Taipei Films	157	(14)
Yomi Braester
Part III The Moral Subject under Global Capitalism	171	(68)
Reproducing the Self: Consumption, Imaginary, and Identity in Chinese Women's Autobiographical Practice in the 1990s	173	(20)
Lingzhen Wang
Urban Ethics: Modernity and the Morality of Everyday Life	193	(24)
Robin Visser
Capitalist and Enlightenment Values in Chinese Fiction of the 1990s: The Case of Yu Hua's Blood Merchant	217	(22)
Deirdre Sabina Knight
Index	239