The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China

by Hockx, Michel

• ISBN13: 9780700710737
• ISBN10: 0700710736
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-06-24
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

At least since the late nineteenth century onwards, Chinese literature as a form of cultural production has been taking place within a specific social space, including writers, critics, journalists, editors, publishers, printers and booksellers. Focusing on people as well as on texts, and looking at what writers did as well as at what they wrote, the essays in this volume draw a vivid and variegated picture of Chinese literary life throughout the modern period. The book treats differences between periods, but also traces the continuities that have characterised modern Chinese literary practice and its discourses from the beginning to the present, including ties of allegiance, utilisation of 'the people' and appropriation of the west. The book places modern Chinese literature firmly within its socio-historical context, thereby increasing the reader's awareness of the hidden assumptions behind literary production. In doing so, it opens new perspectives on Chinese culture as a whole, and on literature as a cosmopolitan concept.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction	p. 1
An Act of Violence: Translation of Western fiction in the late Qing and early Republican period	p. 21
More Than Butterflies: Some observations on the early years of the journal Xiaoshuo yuebao	p. 40
Playing the Field: Aspects of Chinese literary life in the 1920s	p. 61
From Literature to Love: Glory and decline of the love-letter genre	p. 79
Literature High and Low: 'Popular Fiction' in twentieth-century China	p. 113
Stories and Legends: China's largest contemporary popular literature journals	p. 134
No Past to Long For?: A sociology of Chinese writers in exile	p. 161
Displacing the Political: Zhang Yimou's To Live and the field of film	p. 178
Here, There, Anywhere: Networking by young Chinese writers today	p. 198
Bibliography	p. 216
Glossary	p. 232
Contributors	p. 247
Index	p. 248
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