Public Discourses of Contemporary China The Narration of the Nation in Popular Literatures, Film, and Television

by Shen, Yipeng

• ISBN13: 9781137497420
• ISBN10: 1137497424
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-03-05
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Exploring contemporary Chinese literature, film, and television, Yipeng Shen sheds light on the historical significance of nationalism for mass imagination and identification in the less-than-democratic system of China for the past three decades. Analyzing cultural products from a wide range of media, chapters move from the intellectual idealism of the 1980s, through the post-Tiananmen transition, to the national cinema of the 1990s, and finally to the Internet literature of today. Public Discourses of Contemporary China argues that Chinese subjects have, to varying degrees, transformed the state project of modernization into their own through mass aestheticization of the nation.

Author Biography

Yipeng Shen is Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies and International Studies at Trinity College, USA. His main research interests are Asian literature, films, and media culture, particularly modern and contemporary Chinese culture and society.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Heshang: Socialist Historical Consciousness in Transformation and the 1980s Pedagogy of Reform
2. Making Money Is Patriotic: New Immigrant Fiction of the Early 1990s
3. Patriotism, History, and Leitmotif Films in the Late 1990s
4. Netizens, Counter-memories, and Internet Literature into the New Millennium

Conclusion: Dreams in the Twenty-First Century