Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Asian - Chinese

Falling in love, with all its accompanying problems, was a subject of obsessive interest among writers and readers in the Ming Dynasty, when society held strictly to arranged marriages. The stories in this engaging collection all deal with this theme in very different ways, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically. They portray young people choosing their own lovers, resorting to ingenious stratagems and risky escapades in defiance of contemporary mores. Chosen to represent the best works from the great age of the vernacular story, they offer an admirable introduction to the world of...

The phantom heroine--in particular the fantasy of her resurrection through sex with a living man--is one of the most striking features of traditional Chinese literature. Even today the hypersexual female ghost continues to be a source of fascination in East Asian media, much like the sexually predatory vampire in American and European movies, TV, and novels. But while vampires can be of either gender, erotic Chinese ghosts are almost exclusively female. The significance of this gender asymmetry in Chinese literary history is the subject of Judith Zeitlin's elegantly written and...

Shen Congwen (1902?-1988) was one of modern China's great writers and one of the finest Chinese prose stylists of all time. Literary critics and historians have pointed to his power as a stylist and his ability to create characters with rich and realistic souls. Readers credit him with having described beautiful and fulfilling styles of life, even in materially primitive surroundings, that conjure up the "health and dignity" prized by the Crescent Moon writers. He wrote many works exposing the abuses of the military in the countryside, and the vanity of the urban bourgeoisie. Most of the...

The Chinese essay is arguably China's most distinctive contribution to modern world literature, and the period of its greatest influence and popularity--the mid-1930s--is the central concern of this book. What Charles Laughlin terms the literature of leisure is a modern literary response to the cultural past that manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of short, informal essay writing (xiaopin wen). Laughlin examines the essay both as a widely practiced and influential genre of literary expression and as an important counter-discourse to the revolutionary tradition of New...

Grace Fong has written a wonderful history of female writers' participation in the elite conventions of Chinese poetics. Fong's recovery of many of these poets, her able exegesis and elegant, analytical grasp of what the poets were doing is a great read, and her bilingual presentation of their poetry gives the book additional power. This is a persuasive and elegant study. --Tani Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism

In this quietly authoritative book, Grace Fong has brought a group of women poets back to life. Previously ignored by scholars because of their...