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4 books match the query 'Authors, Chinese'

cover of Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer: Ambivalence and Autobiography

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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cover of Paris and the Art of Transposition: Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters

Paris and the Art of Transposition

Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters

Angie Chau

University of Michigan Press, 2023

A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art. 

While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary and visual artwork of five artists who moved between France and China: the painter Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, the painter Pan Yuliang, and the writer Xu Xu. Chau draws the idea of transposition from music theory where it refers to shifting music from one key or clef to another, or to adapting a song originally composed for one instrument to be played by another. Transposing transposition to the study of art and literature, Chau uses the term to describe a fluid and strategic art practice that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old, celebrating both novelty and recognition—a process that occurs when a text gets placed into a fresh context.
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cover of The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography of the Early Twentieth Century

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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cover of Tiananmen Fictions outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture

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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