BiblioVault - Books about Authors, Chinese

The Experience of Modernity

Chinese Autobiography of the Early Twentieth Century

Janet Ng

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Autobiography of the first half of the twentieth century was used variously by different groups of writers to interrogate, negotiate, and even to program the social and political progress of China. However, despite the popularity and success of this genre, it has also been the most forgotten in literary and historical discussions. Personal stories and individual expressions seem to have had no place in 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s China, smothered instead by the grander rhetoric of nationalism. For this reason, autobiography's popularity during the era is an odd phenomenon and also an important genre for study.
The May Fourth Era (1917-40) began as a movement to make the classical literary language accessible to the common people and became a broader political movement against imperialism. The writing of autobiography was influenced by the idea of literature's social and political mission, yet at the same time autobiography was a uniquely potent venue for individual expression. Janet Ng examines this notion in The Experience of Modernity within the framework of autobiographical writings by Chen Hengzhe, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Xie Bingying, Xiao Hong, Eileen Chang, Yu Dafu, and Shen Congwen.
Janet Ng is Assistant Professor of Asian Literature, the College of Staten.

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Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer

Ambivalence and Autobiography

Wendy Larson

Duke University Press, 1991

Throughout the twentieth century, Chinese writers have confronted the problem of creating a new literary tradition that both maintains the culturally unique aspects of a rich heritage and succeeds in promoting a new modernity. In the first book-length treatment of the topic, Wendy Larson examines the contradictory forms of authority at work in the autobiographical texts of modern Chinese writers and scholars and the way these conflicts helped to shape and determine the manner in which writers viewed themselves, their texts, and their work.
Larson focuses on the most famous writers associated with the May Fourth Movement, a group most active in the 1920s and 1930s, and their fundamental ambivalence about writing. She analyzes how their writing paradoxically characterized textual labor as passive, negative, and inferior to material labor and the more physical political work of social progress, and she describes the ways they used textual means to devalue literary labor.
The impact of China’s increasing contact with the West—particularly the ways in which Western notions of “individualism” and “democracy” influenced Chinese ideologies of self and work—is considered. Larson also studies the changes in China’s social structure, notably those linked to the abolition in 1905 of the educational exam system, which subsequently broke the link between the mastery of certain texts and the attainment of political power, further denigrating the cultural role of the writer.

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One Who Knows Me

Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China

Anna M. Shields

Harvard University Press, 2015

The friendships of writers of the mid-Tang era (780s–820s)—between literary giants like Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, Han Yu and Meng Jiao, Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi—became famous through the many texts they wrote to and about one another. What inspired mid-Tang literati to write about their friendships with such zeal? And how did these writings influence Tang literary culture more broadly? In One Who Knows Me, the first book to delve into friendship in medieval China, Anna M. Shields explores the literature of the mid-Tang to reveal the complex value its writers discovered in friendship—as a rewarding social practice, a rich literary topic, a way to negotiate literati identity, and a path toward self-understanding. Shields traces the evolution of the performance of friendship through a wide range of genres, including letters, prefaces, exchange poetry, and funerary texts, and interweaves elegant translations with close readings of these texts. For mid-Tang literati, writing about friendship became a powerful way to write about oneself and to reflect upon a shared culture. Their texts reveal the ways that friendship intersected the public and private realms of experience and, in the process, reshaped both.

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The Romantic Generation of Chinese Writers

Leo Ou-fan Lee

Harvard University Press, 1973

Tiananmen Fictions outside the Square

The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture

Belinda Kong

Temple University Press, 2012

An exciting analysis of the myriad literary effects of Tiananmen, Belinda Kong's Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square is the first full-length study of fictions related to the 1989 movement and massacre. More than any other episode in recent world history, Tiananmen has brought a distinctly politicized Chinese literary diaspora into stark relief.

Kong redefines Tiananmen's meaning from an event that ended in local political failure to one that succeeded in producing a vital dimension of contemporary transnational writing today. She spotlights key writers-Gao Xingjian, Ha Jin, Annie Wang, and Ma Jian-who have written and published about the massacre from abroad. Their outsider/distanced perspectives inform their work, and reveal how diaspora writers continually reimagine Tiananmen's relevance to the post-1989 world at large.

Compelling us to think about how Chinese culture, identity, and politics are being defined in the diaspora, Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square candidly addresses issues of political exile, historical trauma, global capital, and state biopower.

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Wang Kuo-wei

An Intellectual Biography

Joey Bonner

Harvard University Press, 1986

In this first full-fledged intellectual biography of the brilliant and multifaceted Chinese scholar Wang Kuo-wei (1877–1927), Joey Bonner throws important new light on the range and course of ideas in early twentieth-century China. Coincidentally, she illuminates the nature of Wang’s intimate, thirty-year personal and professional association with the well-known Chinese scholar Lo Chen-yü (1866–1940) and provides a most comprehensive and compelling account of her biographee’s posthumously controversial career in the years following the 1911 Revolution.

Pursuing her subject across the whole spectrum of his many scholarly interests, Bonner critically examines Wang’s essays on German philosophy and philosophical aesthetics; his poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetic theory; and his works on ancient Chinese history, particularly of the Shang dynasty. Insightfully relating his strenuous intellectual search in the fields of philosophy, literature, and history to his very personal quest for truth, beauty, and virtue, Bonner shows in this finely crafted book how Wang’s unhappiness in later life as well as his suicide can be understood only within the context of his humanistic concerns in general and his extreme commitment in the postimperial period to the Confucian ethicoreligious tradition in particular. Without compromising the clearheaded critical detachment that characterizes her analysis of the intricacies of his thought, Bonner has produced a portrait of Wang Kuo-wei suffused with warmth and sympathetic respect.

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