Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon

by Rojas; Carlos

• ISBN13: 9780415468800
• ISBN10: 0415468809
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-01-14
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Through analyses of a wide range of Chinese literary and visual texts from the beginning of the twentieth century through the contemporary period, the thirteen essays in this volume challenge the view that canonical and popular culture are self-evident and diametrically opposed categories, and instead argue that the two cultural sensibilities are inextricably bound up with one another. An international line up of contributors present detailed analyses of literary works and other cultural products that have previously been neglected by scholars, while also examining more familiar authors and works from provocative new angles.The essays include investigations into the cultural industries and contexts that produce the canonical and popular, the position of contemporary popular works at the interstices of nostalgia and amnesia, and also the ways in which cultural texts are inflected with gendered and erotic sensibilities while at the same time also functioning as objects of desire in its own right. As the only volume of its kind to cover the entire span of the 20thcentury, and also to consider the interplay of popular and canonical literature in modern China with comparable rigor, Rethinking Chinese Popular Cultureis an important resource for students and scholars of Chinese literature and culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Disease of Canonicity (Carlos Rojas)

Producing Popularity

Perverse Poems and Suspicious Salons: The Friday School in Modern Chinese Literature

The Formation of the Professional Author as a Figure in Early Twentieth Century Vernacular Fiction

Serial Sightings: News, Novelties

An Unofficial History of the Old Capital

On the Literary Consecration of

Canonical Reflections

An Archaeology of Repressed Popularity

Mao Dun, and Their 1920s Literary Polemics

A Tale of Two Cities: Romance, Revenge, and Nostalgia in Two Fin-de-Si+?cle Novels

From Romancing the State to Romancing the Store: Further Elaborations on Some Motifs in Contemporary Taiwan Literature

Nostalgia and Amnesia

Rereading the Red Classics: Bidding Farewell to Revolution and Red Nostalgia

The Reproduction of a Popular Hero

Memory, Photographic Seduction and Allegorical Correspondence

Mutual Reflections

Gender and Desire

Popular Literature and National Representation: The Gender and Genre Politics of Begonia

'What is sentiment?' G++ Gifts, Love Letters, and Material Evidence

Authorial Afterlives and Apocrypha in 1990s Chinese Fiction

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