Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Asian - Chinese

Born at the critical moment of China's emergence into the modern world, Feng Zhi (1905-93), the founder of German Studies at Peking University and creator of the Chinese sonnet, was confronted with the three thousand year history of his home culture, where he felt himself 'in exile'. Inspired by his examination of Western literature and philosophy, Feng Zhi transformed the ancient legend of Wu Zixu - a spectacular story of revenge - into his novel Wu Zixu (1946), a modern lyrical allegory of the wartime 'lost' generation's search for its home. Crystalizing attitudes of the 1940s Chinese...

Although the interrelationship between oral (or performing) and written traditions in Chinese popular literature is an issue that concerns practically everybody who reads or teaches Chinese literature, surprisingly it has never been properly treated in a scholarly forum before. For that reason alone, this volume is especially important and deserves serious consideration from scholars and students in the field.With subjects ranging from Ming vernacular fiction to popular prints and contemporary storytelling and folk ballads, this volume examines the interplay of oral and written traditions...

Known in the West primarily through poorly subtitled films, Chinese martial arts fiction is one of the most iconic and yet the most understudied form of modern sinophone creativity. Current scholarship on the subject is characterized by three central assumptions that I will argue against in this book: first, that martial arts fiction is the representation of a bodily spectacle that historically originated in Hong Kong cinema; second, that the genre came into being as an escapist fantasy that provided psychological comfort to people during the height of imperialism; and third, that martial...

Lu Xun (1881-1936), arguably twentieth-century China's greatest writer, is commonly cast in the mold of a radical iconoclast who vehemently rejected traditional culture. The contradictions and ambivalence so central to his writings, however, are often overlooked. Challenging conventional depictions, Eileen J. Cheng's innovative readings capture Lu Xun's disenchantment with modernity and his transformative engagements with traditional literary conventions in his "modern" experimental works. Lurking behind the ambiguity at the heart of his writings are larger questions on the effects of...