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Providing a broad introduction to the area, A World History of Chinese Literature maps the field of Chinese literature across its various worlds, looking both within - at the world of Chinese literature, its history, linguistic, cultural, local, and regional specificities - and without - at the way Chinese literature has circulated throughout the world. The thematic focus allows for a broad number of key categories, such as authors, genres, genders, regions, as well as innovative explorations of new topics and issues such as inter-arts performativity and transmediation.
The sections cover the circulation and reception of China in world literature, as well as the worlds of:
- Chinese literature across the globe
- Borders, oceans, and rainforests
- Comparative literary genres
- Translingual writers and scholars
- Gender configurations
- Translation and transmediation
With a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection intervenes in current debates on global Chinese literature, Sinophone and Sinoscript studies, and the production and reception of literary works by ethnic Chinese in non-Sinitic languages, as well as Anglophone literature inspired by Chinese literary tradition. It will be of interest to anyone working on or studying Chinese literature, language and culture, as well as world literatures in relation to China.
List of contents
I. Overviews: Literature, History, and the Multiple Worlds
1. General Introduction
2. Modern Chinese Literary Historiography
II. Circulation and Reception of China in World Literature
3. Zeitgeist and Literature: The Reception of Chinese Literature in Germany until the First Half of the Twentieth Century
4. Paris and the Art of Transposition, 1920s-1940s
5. Line, Loop, Constellation: Classical Chinese Poetry between Sinophone and Anglophone Worlds
6. A Decade Apart: Bridging the US and China Literary Systems, 2010-2021
III. Worlding Chinese Literature Across the Globe
7. Chinese Literature at Large: Wong Chin Foo's Border-Crossing Writing
8. Engaging the World in Republican Literature
9. The Rise of Author Museums in the PRC: How Institutions Make World Literature
IV. Sinophone Worlds of Borderlands, Urban Jungles, and Rainforests
10. Yi Literature: Traditional and Contemporary
11. Queer Sinophone Literature in Hong Kong: The Politics of Worldliness
12. Taiwanese Literature in the Early Twenty-First Century
13. Of Other (Chinese) Spaces: Sinophone Literature and the Rainforest
V. Comparative Worlds of Literary Genres
14. Modern Chinese Drama Across Media and Worlds: Centered on the Case of the White Snake
15. Reportage and the Forms of Nonfiction Art in China
16. Reading World Literature in Chinese Science Fiction
17. Ecological Critique as World Literature: Alienation of Nature and Humans in Chen Qiufan's Waste Tide
VI. Translingual Worlds of Writers and Scholars
18. Su Manshu's "Broken Hairpin": A Romantic Tragedy in the Hard Times
19. Qian Zhongshu as a Cosmopolitan
20. Zhang Ailing and the Cold War Cultural Geography
21. Worlding Jin Yong's Martial Arts (Wuxia) Narrative in Three Keys
22. Yan Lianke's Heterotopic Imaginaries
VII. New Worlds of Gender Configurations
23. Modern Intellectual Masculinities in Transformation
24. Nora in China
25. Reading Women: Rethinking a Trope in the Socialist Modern and Beyond
26. Feminine Neorealist Fiction in the New Millennium: Voice, Trauma, and Focalization in Fang Fang's Fiction
VIII. Changing Worlds of Translation and Transmediation
27. Frame Tales: Reading the 1,001 Nights in Early Twentieth-Century China
28. Figuring Time: Lyricism in Contemporary Chinese Poetic Films
29. Performance and Performativity in Modern China
30. Chinese Internet Fictions in the Transmedia World
Index
About the author
Yingjin Zhang was Distinguished Professor of Modern Chinese Literature at the University of California, San Diego, as well as Visiting Professor of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. His publications include The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature (2022), New Chinese-Language Documentaries (Routledge, 2017), and Chinese Film Stars (Routledge, 2010).
Summary
Providing a broad introduction to the area, this book maps the field of Chinese literature across its various worlds. Looking both within – at the world of Chinese literature, its history, linguistic, cultural, local, and regional specificities – and without – at the way Chinese Literature has circulated throughout the world.
