Popular Literature and Culture
Anderson, Marston. “Murder by Number: On Coincidence and Cosmological Assurance in Crime-case Fiction.” Chinoperl Papers 20-22 (1997-99): 121-38.
Andrews, Julia F. “Literature in Line: Picture Stories in the People’s Republic of China.” Inks: Comic and Comic Art Studies 4, 3 (Nov. 1997): 17-32.
Barme, Geremie. “Culture at Large: Consuming T-Shirts in Beijing.” China Information 8, 1/2 (1993): 1-44.
—–. “CCPTM & ADCULT PRC.” The China Journal 41 (Jan. 1999): 1-24. [essay on advertising and popular culture in the PRC; also included in Barme’s In the Red]
—–. In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. NY: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Barthlein, Thomas. “‘Mirrors of Transition‘: Conflicting Images of Society in Change from Popular Chinese Social Novels, 1908 to 1930.” Modern China 25, 2 (April 1999): 204-28.
Benson, Carlton. From Teahouse to Radio: Storytelling and the Commercialization of Culture in 1930s Shanghai. Ph.d. diss. Berkeley: University of California, 1996.
Bordahl, Vibeke. The Eternal Storyteller: Oral Literature in Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998.
—–. “Three Bowls and You Cannot Cross the Ridge: Orality and Literacy in Yangzhou Storytelling.” In Soren Clausen, Roy Starrs, and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds., Cultural Encounters: China, Japan, and the West: Essays Commemorating 25 Years of East Asian studies at the University of Aarhus. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1995, 125-57.
—–. Chinese Storytelling. Text: Vibeke Børdahl; Photos: Jette Ross (1936-2001); Webdesign: Jens-Christian Sørensen
Chao, Shih-Chen. “The Re-institutionalisation of Popular Fiction–The Internet and a New Model of Popular Fiction Prosumption in China.” Journal of the British Association of Chinese Studies 3 (Dec. 2013).
Cheng, Fong-ching. “The Popular Cultural Movement of the 1980s.” In Gloria Davies, ed. Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied, 2001, 71-86.
Chen, Fong-ching and Jin Guantao. From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy: The Chinese Popular Cultural Movement and Political Transformation, 1979-1989. HK: Chinese University of HK Press, 1997.
Chen, Guanzhong. et al. Boximiya Zhongguo (Bohemian China). HK: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Chen, Nancy, Constance Clark, Suzanne Gottschang, and Lyn Jeffry, eds. China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
Chen Pingyuan 陈平原. Qiangu wenren xaike meng: Wuxia xiaoshuo leixing yanjiu 千古文人侠客梦：武侠小说类型研究 (The scholar’s ancient dream of the knight-errant: genre studies of martial arts fiction). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1992.
—–. “From Popular Science to Science Fiction: An Investigation of ‘Flying Machines.’” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdan, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 209-40.
—–. “Literature High and Low: ‘Popular Fiction’ in Twentieth-Century China.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 113-33.
—–. The Development of Chinese Martial Arts Fiction. Tr. Victor Petersen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Chen, Tina Mai. “Thinking Through Embeddedness: Globalization, Culture, and the Popular.” Cultural Critique 58 (Fall 2004): 1-29.
—–, guest editor. Globalization and Popular Culture: Production, Consumption, Identity, special issue of Cultural Critique 58 (Fall 2004).)
“Chinese Popular Culture and the State.” Special issue of positions: east asia culture critiques 9, 1 (2001).
[Contributors: Tani E. Barlow, Dai Jinhua, Judith Farquhar, David S. G. Goodman, James L. Hevia, Li Hsiaoti, Ralph Litzinger, Eric Kit-Wa Ma, Jonathan Scott Noble, Jing Wang; Summary: The State Question in Chinese Popular Culture presents a series of groundbreaking essays that challenge the paradigm dividing Chinese culture into “official” and “unofficial” categories. This binary, which mirrors the “high/low” dichotomy familiar to all practitioners of cultural studies, finds its roots in Cold-War Western romanticization of a Chinese popular culture that stood in defiant opposition to the Communist state. This special issue disputes such simplistic representations and offers new critical trajectories crucial to the study of contemporary Chinese popular culture]
Ching, Leo. “Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism in the Age of Late Capital.” In Arjun Appadurai, ed., Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001, 279-306.
Chow, Rey. “Rereading Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: A Response to the ‘Postmodern’ Condition.” Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986/87): 69-95.
—–. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991. (see chap. 2)
Chu, Yiu-Wai. Hong Kong Pop Culture in the 1980s: A Decade of Splendour. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023.
[Abstract: This book deals with the 1980s – the “golden decade” of Hong Kong pop culture – in which a cosmopolitan lifestyle of pop and chic emerged in the city. Bookended by two major historical incidents, the 1980s will probably enter the annals of Hong Kong history as the decade that defined its future after reversion to Mainland China. Having witnessed and experienced the rise of Hong Kong pop culture to unprecedented heights in this decade, the author enhances its context through a story about his own personal belongings. Examining popular genres including television, film, music, fashion, disco and city magazine, this book teases out the distinctive aspects of Hong Kong pop culture that defined (his) Hong Kong. As Hong Kong has been undergoing drastic changes in recent years, it is necessary to point toward new imaginaries by re-examining its development. Toward this end, this book will shed light on an important research area of Hong Kong Studies as an academic discipline.]
Cochran, Sherman. Inventing Nanjing Road: Commerical Culture in Shanghai, 1990-1945. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Coderre, Laurence. “Ma Ji’s ‘Ode to Friendship’ and the Failures of Revolutionary Language.” In Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds., Maoist Laughter. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2019, 179-96.
Dai, Jinhua. “Invisible Writing: The Politics of Chinese Mass Culture in the 1990s.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11,2 (Spring 1999): 31-60.
—–. “Behind Global Spectacle and National Image Making.” positions 9, 1 (Spring 2001): 161-186.
Davis, Deborah, ed. The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: UCP, 2000.
de Kloet, Jeroen. China with a Cut: Globalisation, Urban Youth and Popular Music. Amsterdam: IIAS Publications, Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
[Abstract: In the wake of intense globalisation and commercialisation in the 1990s, China saw the emergence of a vibrant popular culture. Drawing on sixteen years of research, Jeroen de Kloet explores the popular music industry in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai, providing a fascinating history of its emergence and extensive audience analysis, while also exploring the effect of censorship on the music scene in China. China with a Cut pays particular attention to the dakou culture: so named after a cut nicked into the edge to render them unsaleable, these illegally imported Western CDs still play most of the tracks. They also played a crucial role in the emergence of the new music and youth culture. De Kloet’s impressive study demonstrates how the young Chinese cope with the rapid economic and social changes in a period of intense globalisation, and offers a unique insight into the socio-cultural and political transformations of a rising global power.]
Desser, David. “Consuming Asia: Chinese and Japanese Popular Culture and the American Imaginary.” In Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, ed., Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003.
Doar, Bruce. “Speculation in a Distorting Mirror: Scientific and Political Phantasy in Contemporary Chinese Writing.” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 8 (1982): 51-64.
Dong, Paul. China’s Major Mysteries: Paranormal Phenomena and the Unexplained in the People’s Republic. San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 2000.
Du, Daisy Yan. “Diffusion of Absence: The Official Appropriation of Yuan Zhen in Modern Tongzhou.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22, 2 (Fall 2010): 130-160.
Dutton, Michael. “The Badge as Biography.” In Streetlife China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998, 242-71.
Edwards, Louise and Elaine Jeffreys, eds. Celebrity in China. HK: University of Hong Kong Press, 2010.
[Abstract: Celebrity is a pervasive aspect of everyday life and a growing field of academic inquiry. While there is now a substantial body of literature on celebrity culture in Australia, Europe and the Americas, this is the first book-length exploration of celebrity in China. It examines how international norms of celebrity production interact with those operating in China. The book comprises case studies from popular culture (film, music, dance, literature, internet), official culture (military, political, and moral exemplars) and business celebrities. This breadth provides readers with insights into the ways capitalism and communism converge in the elevation of particular individuals to fame in contemporary China. The book also points to areas where Chinese conceptions of fame and celebrity are unique.]
Fan Boqun 范伯群. Libai liu de hudie meng 礼拜六的蝴蝶梦 (The butterfly dream of the Saturday group). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1989.
—–. Zhongguo xiandai tongsu wenxue shi 中国现代通俗文学史 (A history of modern Chinese popular literature). Beijing: Beijing daxue, 2007.
—–. A History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature. Trs. Dong Xiang and Jihui Wang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by John A. Crespi]
Farquhar, Judith. “For Your Reading Pleasure: Self-Health [Ziwo Baojian] Information in 1990s Beijing.” positions 9, 1 (Spring 2001): 105-31.
Farrer, James. Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Farrer, James and Andrew Field, guest editors. Special issue on “Play and Power in Chinese Nightlife Spaces.” China: An International Journal 6, 1 (March 2008). [essays by Field, Anouska Komlosy, Tiantian Zheng, adn Tamara Perkins]
Feng, Jin. “‘Addicted to Beauty’: Consuming and Producing Web-based Chinese Danmei Fiction at Jinjiang.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (Fall 2009): 1-41.
—–. “Cong Jinjian danmei wen kan Zhongguo nuxing xingbie shenfen de goucheng” (Constructing female gender identities through Danmei at Jinjiang). Zhongguo xing yanjiu 30, 3 (2009): 132-153.
—–. Romancing the Internet Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance. Leiden: Brill, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Heather Inwood]
[Abstract: In Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance, Jin Feng examines the evolution of Chinese popular romance on the Internet. She first provides a brief genealogy of Chinese Web literature and Chinese popular romance, and then investigates how large socio-cultural forces have shaped new writing and reading practices and created new subgenres of popular romance in contemporary China. Integrating ethnographic methods into literary and discursive analyses, Feng offers a gendered, audience-oriented study of Chinese popular culture in the age of the Internet.]
Field, Andrew. Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954. HK: Chinese University Press, 2010.
[Abstract: Drawing upon a unique and untapped reservoir of newspapers, magazines, novels, government documents, photographs and illustrations, this book traces the origin, pinnacle, and ultimate demise of a commercial dance industry in Shanghai between the end of the First World War and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Delving deep into the world of cabarets, nightclubs, and elite ballrooms that arose in the city in the 1920s and peaked in the 1930s, the book assesses how and why Chinese society incorporated and transformed this westernized world of leisure and entertainment to suit their own tastes and interests. Focusing on the jazz-age nightlife of the city in its “golden age,” the book examines issues of colonialism and modernity, jazz and African-American culture, urban space, sociability and sexuality, and latter-day Chinese national identity formation in a tumultuous era of war and revolution.]
Gimpel, Denise. “More Than Butterflies: Short Fiction in the Early Years of the Literary Journal Xiaoshuo yuebao.” In Findeison and Gassmann, eds., Autumn Floods: Essay in Honour of Marian Galik. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997, 243-60.
—–. “Beyond Butterflies: Some Observations on the Early Years of the Journal Xiaoshuo yuebao.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 40-60.
Goodman, David S. G. “Contending the Popular: Party-State and Culture.” positions 9, 1 (Spring 2001): 245-52.
Farquhar, Mary Ann. “Sanmao: Classic Cartoons and Chinese Popular Culture.” In John Lent, ed., Asian Popular Culture. Boulder: Westview, 1995, 139-58.
Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation. Cambridge : Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.
Gold, Thomas. “Go With Your Feelings: Hong Kong and Taiwan Popular Culture in Greater China.” In David Shambaugh ed., Greater China: The New Superpower? NY: Oxford UP, 1995, 255-73.
Gong, Haoming and Xin Yang. “Digitized Parody: The Politics of Egao in Contemporary China.” China Information24, 1 (2010): 3-26.
Guide to Chinese Popular Culture (informative website)
Guo, Li. “Humor, Vernacularization, and Intermedial Laughter in Maoist Pingtan.” In Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds., Maoist Laughter. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2019, 105-22.
Hamm, John Christopher. “The Marshes of Mount Liang Beyond the Sea: Jin Yong’s Early Martial Arts Fiction and Post-War Hong Kong.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, 1 (Spring 1999): 93-124.
—–. “Local Heroes: Guangdong School wuxia Fiction and Hong Kong’s Imagining of China.” Twentieth-Century China 27, 1 (Nov. 2001): 71-96.
—–. “Reading the Swordsman’s Tale: Shisanmei and Ernu yingxiong zhuan.” T’oung Pao 84 (1998): 328-55.
—–. Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel. Honolulu: University of Hawa’ii Press, 2005. [MCLC Resource Center review by Paul B. Foster]
Hartley, John and Michael Keene, eds. “Creative Industries and Innovation in China,” a special issue of International Journal of Cultural Studies 9, 3 (2006).
He, Qiliang. “Between Business and Bureaucrats: Pingtan Storytelling in Maoist and Post-Maoist China.” Modern China 36, 3(2010): 243-268.
[Abstract: This article examines the complex relationship of the state, market, and artists in pingtan storytelling in post-1949 China. By focusing on Su Yuyin, a pingtan storyteller, and his performing career, this article explores the persistence of cultural markets after the Communist victory in 1949 and argues that the market continued to play a significant role in shaping China’s popular culture, which the government was keen on patronizing and politicizing. By comparing the regime’s management of pingtan storytelling before and after the Cultural Revolution (1966—1976), this article further argues that the regime’s censorship of popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s was handicapped by its lack of financial resources and the continued existence of cultural markets. The result was that censorship was not as strictly and efficiently enforced as has been assumed.]
—–. Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta Since 1949. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
[Abstract: Gilded Voices pieces together published, archival, and oral history sources to explore the role of the cultural market in mediating between the state and artists in the PRC era. By focusing on pingtan, a storytelling art using the Suzhou dialect, the book documents both the state’s efforts to police artists and their repertoire and storytellers’ collaboration with, as well as resistance to, state supervision and intervention. The book thereby challenges long-held scholarly assumptions about the Chinese Communist Party’s success in politicizing popular culture, patronizing artists, abolishing the cultural market, and enforcing rigid censorship in Mao’s times.]
Ho, Virgil K. Y. Understanding Canton: Rethinking Popular Culture in the Republican Period. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005
Hockx, Michel and Julia Straus, eds. Special Issue: Culture of the Contemporary PRC. The China Quarterly 183 (Sept. 2005).
Huang, Huilin, ed. Dangdai Zhongguo dazhong wenhua yanjiu (Studies in contemporary Chinese mass culture). Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue, 1999.
Huat, Chua Beng. Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2012.
[Abstract: East Asian pop culture can be seen as an integrated cultural economy emerging from the rise of Japanese and Korean pop culture as an influential force in the distribution and reception networks of Chinese-language pop culture embedded in the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Taking Singapore as a locus of pan-Asian Chineseness, Chua Beng Huat provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences’ formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. In an era where exercise of military power is increasingly restrained, pop culture has become an important component of soft power diplomacy and transcultural collaborations in a region that is still haunted by colonization and violence. The author notes that the aspirations behind national governments’ efforts to use popular culture is limited by the fragmented nature of audiences, who respond differently to the same products; by the danger of backlash from other members of the importing country’s population that do not consume the popular culture products in question; and by the efforts of the primary consuming country, the People’s Republic of China, to shape products through coproduction strategies and other indirect modes of intervention.]
Hung, Chang-tai. War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Hung, Eva. “Giving Texts a Context: Chinese Translations of Classical English Detective Stories, 1896-1916.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdan, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 151-76.
Huntington, Rania. “The Weird in the Newspaper.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 341-97. [deals mostly with the Dianshizhai huabao]
Huss, Ann and Jianmei Liu, eds. The Jin Yong Phenomenon: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and Modern Chinese Literary History. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2007.
[Abstract: This pioneering book is the first English-language collection of academic articles on Jin Yong’s works. It introduces an important dissenting voice in Chinese literature to the English-speaking audience. Jin Yong is hailed as the most influential martial arts novelist in twentieth-century Chinese literary history. His novels are regarded by readers and critics as “the common language of Chinese around the world” because of their international circulation and various adaptations (film, television serials, comic books, video games). Not only has the public affirmed the popularity and literary value of his novels, but the academic world has finally begun to notice his achievement as well. The significance of this book lies in its interpretation of Jin Yong’s novels through the larger lens of twentieth-century Chinese literature. It considers the important theoretical issues arising from such terms as modernity, gender, nationalism, East / West conflict, and high literature versus low culture.]
Huss, Mikael. “Hesitant Journey to the West: Science Fiction’s Changing Fortunes in Mainland China.” Science Fiction Studies 27, 1 (2000): 92-104.
Jiang, Jin. Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009.
[Abstract: This ground-breaking volume documents women’s influence on popular culture in twentieth-century China by examining Yue opera. A subgenre of Chinese opera, it migrated from the countryside to urban Shanghai and morphed from its traditional all-male form into an all-female one, with women cross-dressing as male characters for a largely female audience. Yue opera originated in the Zhejiang countryside as a form of story-singing, which rural immigrants brought with them to the metropolis of Shanghai. There, in the 1930s, its content and style transformed from rural to urban, and its cast changed gender. By evolving in response to sociopolitical and commercial conditions and actress-initiated reforms, Yue opera emerged as Shanghai’s most popular opera from the 1930s through the 1980s and illustrates the historical rise of women in Chinese public culture. Jiang examines the origins of the genre in the context of the local operas that preceded it and situates its development amid the political, cultural, and social movements that swept both Shanghai and China in the twentieth century. She details the contributions of opera stars and related professionals and examines the relationships among actresses, patrons, and fans. As Yue opera actresses initiated reforms to purge their theater of bawdy eroticism in favor of the modern love drama, they elevated their social image, captured the public imagination, and sought independence from the patriarchal opera system by establishing their own companies. Throughout the story of Yue opera, Jiang looks at Chinese women’s struggle to control their lives, careers, and public images and to claim ownership of their history and artistic representations.]
Johnson, David et al, eds. Popular Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Jordan, David K., Andrew D. Morris, and Marc L. Moskowitz, eds. The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004.
Kaikkonen, Marja. “From Knights to Nudes: Chinese Popular Literature Since Mao.” Stockholm Journal of East Asian Studies 5 (1995): 85-110.
—–. Laughable Propaganda: Modern Xiangsheng as Didactic Entertainment. Stockholm: Stockholm East Asian Monographs, Institute of Oriental Languages, 1990.
—–. “Quyi: Will It Survive?” In Vibeke Børdahl, ed., The Eternal Storyteller: Oral Literature in Modern China. Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999, 62-68.
—–. “Stories and Legends: China’s Largest Contemporary Popular Literature Journals.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 134-60.
—–. “The Detective in the Service of the Emperor, the Republic, and Communism.” In Gunilla Lindberg-Wada ed., Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective. Berline: Walter de Gruyter, 2006, vol 4, 157-198.
—–. “Becoming Literature: Views of Popular Fiction in Twentieth-century China.” In Gunilla Lindberg-Wada ed., Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006, vol 1, 38-69.
Kato, M. T. From Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalization, Revolution and Popular Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. [publisher’s blurb]
Keane, Michael. Created in China: The Great New Leap Forward. Routledge 2007.
Kinkley, Jeffrey. “Chinese Crime Fiction.” Society 30, 4 (May/June 1993): 51-62.
—–. “The Politics of Detective Fiction in Post-Mao China: Rebirth or Re-extinction?” The Armchair Detective 18, 4 (Fall 1985): 372-78.
—–. “The Post-Colonial Detective in People’s China.” In Ed Christian, ed., The Post-Colonial Detective. NY: St. Martin’s, 2000.
—–. Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China. Stanford: SUP, 2000.
Ko, Yu-fen. “Hello Kitty and Identity Politics in Taiwan.” Conference paper, Remapping Taiwan (UCLA, Oct. 13-15, 2000).
Kong, Shuyu. Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
—–. “The ‘Affective Alliance’: Undercover, Internet Media Fandom, and the Sociality of Cultural Consumption in Postsocialist China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 1 (Spring 2012): 1-47.
—–. Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China. London & New York: Routledge, 2014.
[Abstract: Since the early 1990s the media and cultural fields in China have become increasingly commercialized, resulting in a massive boom in the cultural and entertainment industries. This evolution has also brought about fundamental changes in media behaviour and communication, and the enormous growth of entertainment culture and the extensive penetration of new media into the everyday lives of Chinese people. Against the backdrop of the rapid development of China’s media industry and the huge growth in social media, this book explores the emotional content and public discourse of popular media in contemporary China. It examines the production and consumption of blockbuster films, television dramas, entertainment television shows, and their corresponding online audience responses, and describes the affective articulations generated by cultural and media texts, audiences and social contexts. Crucially, this book focuses on the agency of audiences in consuming these media products, and the affective communications taking place in this process in order to address how and why popular culture and entertainment programs exert so much power over mass audiences in China. Indeed, Shuyu Kong shows how Chinese people have sought to make sense of the dramatic historical changes of the past three decades through their engagement with popular media, and how this process has created a cultural public sphere where social communication and public discourse can be launched and debated in aesthetic and emotional terms. Based on case studies that range from television drama to blockbuster films, and reality television programmes to social media sites, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, media and communication studies, film studies and television studies.
Kozar, Seana. “Paperback Haohan and Other ‘Genred Genders’: Negotiated Masculinities Among Chinese Popular Fiction Readers.” Canadian Folklore Canadien 19, 1 (1997).
Latham, Kevin and Stuart Thompson. Consuming China Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China. Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001.
Lawson, Francesca R. Sborgi. The Narrative Arts of Tianjin: Between Music and Language. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010.
[Abstract: explores one of the richest forms of Chinese cultural expression: performed narratives. . . . Lawson examines the relationships between language and music in the performance of four narrative genres in the city of Tianjin, China, based upon original field research conducted in the People’s Republic of China in the mid-1980s and in 1991.]
Laughlin, Charles. “Literature and Popular Culture.” In Robert E. Gamer, ed., Understanding Contemporary China. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999.
Lee, Haiyan. “All the Feelings That Are Fit to Print: The Community of Sentiment and the Literary Public Sphere in China, 1900-1918.” Modern China 27, no. 3 (July 2001): 291-327.
Lent, John. “The Renaissance of Taiwan Cartoons.” Asian Culture Quarterly 21, 1 (1993): 1-17.
Levy, Richard. “Corruption in Popular Culture.” In Perry Link, Richard P. Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, 39-56.
Lewins, Frank. “Everyday Culture in China: The Experience of Intellectuals.” China Information 7, 2 ( 1992): 56-69.
Li, Danke. “Popular Culture in the Making of Anti-Imperialist and Nationalist Sentiments in Sichuan.” Modern China30, 4 (Oct. 2004): 470-505.
[Abstract: Existing Western scholarship on the rights recovery movement in Sichuan mainly focuses on the role played by elites. This article argues that popular culture, in the form of folk stories, songs, and children’s primers, also contributed to that movement by shaping and expressing popular anti-imperialist attitudes. Its analysis of primers available in late Qing Sichuan and popular stories about the activities of foreigners prevalent in the early 1900s serves to reveal a rich local cultural milieu of time-nurtured anti-imperialist sentiment among common people, which broadly influenced local political action. The protests over the Jiangbei mining concession encompassed both elite and ordinary people, although each group understood the issue differently.]
Li, Hsiao-t’i. Opera, Society, and Politics: Chinese Intellectuals and Popular Culture, 1901-1937. Ph. D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1996.
—–. “Making a Name and a Culture for the Masses in China.” positions 9, 1 (Spring 2001): 29-68.
Lin Fangmei. Social Change and Romantic Ideology: The Impact of the Public Industry, Family Organization and Gender Roles on the Reception and Interpretation of Romance Fiction in Taiwan. Ph. D. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 1992.
Link, Perry. “Traditional Style Popular Urban Fiction in the Teens and Twenties.” In Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977, 327-50.
—–. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities. Berkeley: UCP, 1981.
—–. “The Genie and the Lamp: Revolutionary Xiangsheng.” In Bonnie McDougall, ed., Popular Literature and the Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 83-111.
—–. “Hand Copied Entertainment Fiction from the Cultural Revolution.” In Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic. Boulder: Westview, 1989, 17-36.
Link, Perry and Kate Zhou. “Shunkouliu: Popular Satirical Sayings and Popular Thought.” In Perry Link, Richard P. Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, 89-110.
Link, Perry, Richard P. Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowiczet, eds. Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic. Boulder: Westview, 1989.
—–. Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Litzinger, Ralph A. “Government from Below: The State, the Popular, and the Illusion of Autonomy.” positions 9, 1 (Spring 2001): 253-66.
Liu Ching Chih, ed. The Question of Reception: Marial Arts Fiction in English Translation. HK: Centre for Literature and Translation, Lingnan College, 1997.
Liu, Kang. “Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997): 99-122. Rpt. in Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 123-44.
—–. “The Rise of Commercial Popular Culture and the Legacy of the Revolutionary Culture of the Masses.” In Liu, Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2004, 78-101.
—–. Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004.
Liu, Kang. “Reineventing the Red Classics in the age of Globalization.”Neohelicon 37 (2010): 329-347.
Liu, Lydia. “A Folksong Immortal and Official Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century China.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 553-609.
—–. “What’s Happened to Ideology? Transnationalism, Postsocialism, and the Study of Global Media Culture.” Working Papers in Asian/Pacific Studies. Durham: Duke University, 1998. [focuses on “Beijingers in New York”]
Liu, Petrus. Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 2011. [MCLC Resource Center review by Paul B. Foster]
[Abstract: 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 arts fiction reflects a patriotic attitude that celebrates the greatness of Chinese culture, which in turn is variously described as the China-complex, colonial modernity, essentialized identity, diasporic consciousness, anxieties about globalization, or other psychological and ideological difficulties experienced by the Chinese people.]
Liu, Ts’un-yan. Chinese Middlebrow Fiction From the Ch’ing and Early Republican Era. HK: Chinese UP, 1984.
Liu, Xiaobo. “From Wang Shuo’s Wicked Satire to Hu Ge’s Egao: Political Humor in a Post-Totalitarian Dictatorship.” In Liu Xiaobo, No Enemies No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, 177-187.
Lo, Kwai-cheung. “Giant Panda and Mickey Mouse: Transnational Objects of Fantasy in Post-1997 Hong Kong.” Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia, UCLC. [draft essay, not for citing]
—–. Chinese Face/Off: The Transnational Culture of Hong Kong. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. [examines film, newspaper culture, theme parks, and kung-fu comics, as well as the interaction of the HK film industry with Hollywood, Lo uncovers HK’s “transnational” identity defined in terms of complex relationships with mainland Chna, other diasporic communities (like Taiwan), and the West]
London, Miriam and Mu Yang-jen. “What Are They Reading in China?” Saturday Review 30 (Sept. 1978): 42-43.
Lu, Chao. “Popular Novels Leave Serious Stuff Standing.” China Daily (Sept. 2, 1986).
Lu, Sheldon H. “Popular Culture: Toward and Historical and Dialectical Method.” In Lu, ed., China, Trannational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 195-212.
Luo Liqun 罗立群. Zhongguo wuxia xiaoshuo shi 中国武侠小说史 (History of Chinese martial arts fiction). Shenyang: Liaoning renmin, 1990.
Ma, Iris. “Imagining Female Heroism: Three Tales of the Female Knight-Errant in Republican China.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 31: 183–204.
[Abstract: Invented largely for urban audiences and widely circulated across multiple media, the image of the female knight-errant attracted unprecedented attention among writers, readers, publishers, and officials in the first half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on three best-selling martial arts tales published in Republican China (1912–1949), paying particular attention to their martial heroines. It also explores what granted the female knight-errant character such enduring popularity and how the writers—Xiang Kairan, Gu Mingdao, and Wang Dulu—garnered the interest of their readers. As the author points out, martial arts novelists drew on a long and rich genre repertoire formulated before 1911 while taking into consideration contemporary debates regarding gender, thereby maintaining the female knight-errant figure as a relevant and compelling construct. More importantly, the author argues, through portraying their martial heroines in relation to family, courtship, and female subjectivity, martial arts novelists resisted the prevailing discourse on Chinese womanhood of their times while imagining female heroism.]
Mair, Victor H. and Mark Bender, eds. The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2011.
[Abstract: two of the world’s leading sinologists, Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender, capture the breadth of China’s oral-based literary heritage. This collection presents works drawn from the large body of oral literature of many of China’s recognized ethnic groups–including the Han, Yi, Miao, Tu, Daur, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Kazak–and the selections include a variety of genres. Chapters cover folk stories, songs, rituals, and drama, as well as epic traditions and professional storytelling, and feature both familiar and little-known texts, from the story of the woman warrior Hua Mulan to the love stories of urban storytellers in the Yangtze delta, the shaman rituals of the Manchu, and a trickster tale of the Daur people from the forests of the northeast. The Cannibal Grandmother of the Yi and other strange creatures and characters unsettle accepted notions of Chinese fable and literary form. Readers are introduced to antiphonal songs of the Zhuang and the Dong, who live among the fantastic limestone hills of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region; work and matchmaking songs of the mountain-dwelling She of Fujian province; and saltwater songs of the Cantonese-speaking boat people of Hong Kong. The editors feature the Mongolian epic poems of Geser Khan and Jangar; the sad tale of the Qeo family girl, from the Tu people of Gansu and Qinghai provinces; and local plays known as “rice sprouts” from Hebei province. These fascinating juxtapositions invite comparisons among cultures, styles, and genres, and expert translations preserve the individual character of each thrillingly imaginative work.]
McDougall, Bonnie, ed. Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China. Berkeley: UCP, 1984.
Meng, Bingchun. “From Steamed Bun to Grass Mud Horse: Egao as Alternative Political Discourse on the Chinese Internet.”Global Media and Communication 7, 1 (2011): 33-51.
Ming, Feng-ying. “Baoyu in Wonderland: Technological Utopia in th Early Modern Chinese Science Fiction Novel.” In Ying-jin Zhang, ed., China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999, 152-72.
Moskowitz, Marc L. Popular Culture in Taiwan: Charismatic Modernity. NY: Routledge, 2010.
[Abstract: The growing field of popular culture studies in Taiwan can be divided into two distinct academic trends; a different analytical framework is used to examine either locally oriented popular culture or transnational pop culture. This volume combine these two academic trends, firstly by revealing that localized popular culture in Taiwan is in many ways a merging of Chinese, Japanese, American, and indigenous cultures and therefore is a form of hybridity that arose long before the term became popular. Secondly, the chapters show that the transnational character of Taiwan’s pop culture is one of the more important ways that it distinguishes itself from mainland China. In other words, it is precisely Taiwan’s transnational hybrid character that helps to define it as a distinctive local space. The contributors explore how traditional Chinese influences modern localized lives in Taiwan, localized identity, culture, and politics as a contested domain with Chinese and traditional Taiwanese identities and Taiwan’s localization process as contesting Taiwan’s gravitation towards globalized Western culture.]
Mosher, David. “Stifled Laughter: How the Communist Party Killed Chinese Humor.” Danwei.org (Nov. 16, 2004).
Movius, L. Popular Culture, Social Change and Political Reaction in Post-Reform China (posted at the Guide to Chinese Popular Culture site)
Mu, Aili. “Two of Zhao Benshan’s Comic Skits: Their Critical Implications in Contemporary China.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 30, 2 (July 2004): 3-34.
Ng, Mau-sang. “Women, Work and Identity: A Study of Two 1930s Novels on the Opera Singer.” In Liu and David Faure, eds., Unity and Diversity: Local Cultures and Identities in China. HK: HKUP, 1996, 125-38.
—–. “A Common People’s Literature: Popular Fiction and Social Change in Republican China.” East Asian History 9 (June 1995): 1-22.
—–. “The Crystal and May Fourth Taste Culture.” In M. Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Slovak Academy of Sciences, 1990. [Pp. 167-78 -about the tabloid journal Jingbao]
Ni, Zhange. “Steampunk, Zombie Apocalypse, and Homoerotic Romance: Re-writing Revolution-Plus-Love in Contemporary China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 2 (Fall 2020): 179-229.
Notar, Beth. Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.
Pang, Laikwan. “Magic and Modernity in China.” positions: east asia cultures critiques 12, 2 (Fall 2004): 299-328.
Pickowicz, Paul. “The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Films of the 1930s.” Modern China 17, 1 (January 1991): 38-75.
Pollard, David. “Jules Verne, Science Fiction and Related Matters.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1998, 177-208.
Rosenmeier, Christopher. On the Margins of Modernism: Xu Xu, Wumingshi and Popular Chinese Literature in the 1940s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
[Abstract: Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), but although they were an integral part of the Chinese literary scene their bestselling fiction has been given scant attention in histories of Chinese writing. This groundbreaking book, the first book-length study of Xu Xu and Wumingshi in English or any other western language, re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940s. With in-depth analyses of their innovative short stories and novels, Christopher Rosenmeier demonstrates how these important writers incorporated and adapted narrative techniques from Shanghai modernist writers like Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, contesting the view that modernism had little lasting impact in China and firmly positioning these two figures within the literature of their times.]
Sang, Tze-lan D. “Women’s Work and Boundary Transgression in Wang Dulu’s Popular Novels.” In Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds., Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, 287-308.
Sang Ye. “Beam Me Up.” Tr. Geremie Barme. Humanities Research 2 (1999).
Schleep, Elisabeth. “‘Steady Updating Is the Kingly Way’: The VIP System and Its Impact on the Creation of Online Novels.” Chinese Literature Today 5, 1 (Jan. 2015): 65-73.
Shapiro, Hugh. “The Puzzle of Spermatorrhea in Republican China.” positions 6, 3 (Winter 1998): 551-596.
Shen, Kuiyi. “Comics, Picture Books, and Cartoonists in Republican China.” Inks: Comic and Comic Art Studies 4, 3 (Nov. 1997): 2-16.
Song, Mingwei. “Popular Genre Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 394-99.
Stanley, Nick and Siu King Chung. “Representing the Past as the Future: The Shenzhen Chinese Folk Culture Villages and the Making of Chinese Identity.” Journal of Museum Ethnography 7 (1995): 25-40.
Tang, Xiaobing. “New Urban Culture and the Anxiety of Everyday Life in Contemporary China.” In Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder, eds., In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996, 107-22.
Taylor, Jeremy. From “Hello Kitty” to Hot-Springs: Nostalgia and the Japanese Past in Taiwan. Bochum: Cathay Skripten, Taiwan Studies Series, 2001.
[Abstract: In the summers of 1998 and 1999, something of a storm was brewing in Taiwan over the issue of a cartoon character. Hello Kitty, or Kaidi Mao, as she was known in the official Mandarin Chinese language of the island, was at the centre of a debate about issues that seemed way beyond her depth. As Taiwanese students sought to adorn themselves with all kinds of Hello Kitty paraphernalia, intellectual circles were busy either deriding the trend or discussing, in all seriousness, how it reflected Japanese “cultural imperialism” and a dangerous threat to the well-being of Taiwan as a whole. The paper explores other manifestations of a Japanese presence in Taiwan that have instead been looked upon with favour and nostalgia. How is it that a cartoon character has been accused of lying behind a new form of “cultural colonialism”, when at the same time, the physical relics that Japanese colonialism left in Taiwan in the early decades of the twentieth century have today become such popular sites of nostalgic tourism? The answers to these questions lie at least in part in Taiwan’s experience with modernity, particularly as it existed under Japanese colonial rule, and indeed, the way in which so much of the Japanese colonial experience eventually became internalised in Taiwan.]
Wagner, Rudolf. “Lobby Literature: The Archaelology and Present Functions of Science Fiction in China.” In Jeffrey Kinkley, ed., After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society, 1978-1981. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1985, 17-62.
Wan, Margaret. Green Peony and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.
Wang, Dun. “The Late Qing’s Other Utopias: China’s Science-Fictional Imagination, 1900-1910.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 34, 2 (Special Issue “Asia and the Other”) (November 2008): 37-62.
Wang, Jing. “The State Question in Chinese Popular Cultural Studies.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2, 1 (2001): 35-52.
—–. “Culture as Leisure and Culture as Capital.” positions 9, 1 (Spring 2001): 69-104.
—–. “Bourgeois Bohemians in China? Neo-Tribes and the Urban Imaginary.” The China Quarterly 183 (Sept. 2005): 532-548.
—–. “The Global Reach of a New Discourse: How Far Can ‘Creative Industries’ Travel?” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7, 1 (2004): 9-19.
—–. Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
[Abstract: One part riveting account of fieldwork and one part rigorous academic study, Brand New Chinaoffers a unique perspective on the advertising and marketing culture of China. Jing Wang’s experiences in the disparate worlds of Beijing advertising agencies and the U.S. academy allow her to share a unique perspective on China during its accelerated reintegration into the global market system.Brand New Chinaoffers a detailed, penetrating, and up-to-date portrayal of branding and advertising in contemporary China…]
Wei, Yan. Detecting Chinese Modernities: Rupture and Continuity in Chinese Detective Fiction, 1896-1949. Leiden: Brill, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jeffrey Kinkley]
[Abstract: Yan Wei historicizes the two stages in the development of Chinese detective fiction and discusses the rupture and continuity in the cultural transactions, mediation, and appropriation that occurred when the genre of detective fiction traveled to China during the first half of the twentieth century. Wei identifies two divergent, or even opposite strategies for appropriating Western detective fiction during the late Qing and the Republican periods. She further argues that these two periods in the domestication of detective fiction were also connected by shared emotions. Both periods expressed ambivalent and sometimes contradictory views regarding Chinese tradition and Western modernity.]
Wei Shaochang 魏绍昌, ed. Yuanyang hudie pai yanjiu ziliao 鸳鸯蝴蝶派研究资料 (Research materials on the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school). 2 vols. Shanghai: Wenyi, 1982.
Williams, John. “‘Attacking Queshan’: Popular Culture and the Creation of a Revolutionary Folklore in Southern Henan.” Modern China 36 (2010): 644-75.
[Abstract: This article examines rural mobilization and propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Henan via the case of an uprising during the Northern Expedition, as well as official and popular representation of that event before and after 1949. It confirms recent scholarship regarding the role of local interpersonal networks in early rural mobilization, which in this context required infiltration of local, religio-magical popular militias called Red Spear societies. It then examines popular and party-constructed representations of the revolt, illustrating both the function of early CCP propaganda within rural popular culture and its implications for official historiography, which practiced specific forms of erasure in representing popular collective memory. It uses party documents, memoirs, and local histories to show that the historical significance of the Queshan uprising resides less in the failed revolt itself than in the ways its legacy was appropriated by cadres and historians during the twentieth century.]
Wong, Timothy C. “What’s in the Name?” In Wong, ed./tr., Stories for Saturday: Twentieth Century Chinese Popular Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003, 229-44.
Wu, Dingbo and Patrick Murphy, eds. Handbook of Chinese Popular Culture. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1994.
—–. “Chinese Science Fiction.” In Dingbo Wu and Patrick Murphy, eds., Handbook of Chinese Popular Culture. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984, 257-77.
Wu, Guo. “Imagined Future in Chinese Novels at the Turn of the 21st century: A Study of Yellow Peril, The End of Red Chinese Dynasty and A Flourishing Age: China, 2013.” ASIANetwork Exchange 20, 1 (2012): 47-56.
Wu Yu 吴雨, Liang Licheng 梁立成, and Wang Daozhi 王道智. Minguo hei shehui 民国黑社会 (Underworld society in Republican China). Nanjing: Jiangsu guji, 1988.
Ye, Xiaoqing. Popular Culture in Shanghai, 1884–1898. Ph.D. diss. Canberra: Australian National University, 1991.
—–. The Dianshizhai Pictorial: Shanghai Urban Life, 1884-1898. Ann Arbor: Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies, 2003.
Yeh, Catherine Vance. “Creating the Urban Beauty: The Shanghai Courtesan in Late Qing Illustrations.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 397-447.
Yu, Haiqing. “After the ‘Steamed Bun’: E’gao and Its Postsocialist Politics.” Chinese Literature Today 5, 1 (Jan. 2015): 55-64.
Yuanyang hudie–“Libai liu” pai zuopin xuan 鸳鸯蝴蝶－礼拜六派作品选 (Selected works of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly and Saturday school). Ed. Fan Boqun. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1991.
Yuanyang hudie pai yanqing xiaoshuo jicui 鸳鸯蝴蝶派言情小说集萃 (Collection of love stories of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly school). 3 vols. Beijing: Zhongyang minzu xueyuan, 1993.
Zha, Jianying. China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture. New York: The New Press, 1995.
Zhang, Zhen. “Mediating Time: The ‘Rice Bowl of Youth’ in Fin-de-siecle Urban China.” In Arjun Appadurai, ed., Globalization. Durham: Duke UP, 2001, 131-54.
Zhao, Bin and Graham Murdock. “Young Pioneers: Children and the Making of Chinese Consumerism.” Cultural Studies 10, 2 (1996): 201-17.
Zhao, Yuezhi. “The Rich, the Laid Off, nd the Criminal in Tabloid Tales: Read All about It.” In Perry Link, Richard P. Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, 111-36.
Zhu, Ping. “Huajixi, Heterglossia, and Maoist Language.” In Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds., Maoist Laughter. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2019, 162-78.
Realism
Anderson, Marsten. The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period. Berkeley: UCP, 1990.
Bichler, Lorenz. “Coming to Terms with a Term: Notes on the History of the Use of Socialist Realism in China.” In Chung, ed. In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Critical Studies no. 6. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, 30-43.
Button, Peter. Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity. Leiden: Brill, 2009. [MCLC Resource Center Publications review by Thomas Moran]
[Abstract: The emergence of the Chinese socialist realist novel can best be understoodin light of the half-century long formation of the modern concept of literature in China. Globalized in the wake of modern capitalism, literary modernity configures the literary text in a relationship to both modern philosophy and literary theory. This book traces China’s unique, complex, and creative articulation of literary modernity beginning with Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q.” Cai Yi’s aesthetic theory of the type (dianxing) and the image (xingxiang) is then explored in relation to global currents in literary thought and philosophy, making possible a fundamental rethinking of Chinese socialist realist novels like Yang Mo’s Song of Youth and Luo Guangbin and Yan Yiyan’s Red Crag.]
Cai, Keru. “The Temporality of Poverty: Realism in Lao She’s Camel Xiangzi.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 1 (Spring 2020): 1-36.
Chan, Roy Bing. The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. [MCLC Resource Center review by Laurence Coderre]
[Abstract: The Edge of Knowing explores the relationship between the rhetoric of dreams and realist literary practice in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period just following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The writers’ attention to dreams demonstrates the multiple influences of Western psychology, utopian desire for revolutionary change, and the enduring legacy of traditional Chinese philosophy. At the same time, modern Chinese writers used their work to represent social reality for the purpose of nation-building. Recent political usage of dream rhetoric in the People’s Republic of China attests to the continuing influence of dreams on the imagination of Chinese modernity. ]
Chan, Stephen. “Realism as Cultural and Historical Transformation in Post-May Fourth China: Some Preliminary Analyses.” Tamkang Review 16, 4 (1986): 363-80.
Chan, Sylvia. “Realism or Socialist Realism? The ‘Proletarian’ Episode in Modern Chinese Literature.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 9 (1983): 55-74.
—–. “Revolutionary Realism: Old Wine in New Bottles or New Wine in Old Bottles?” In Michael Yahuda, ed., New Directions in the Social Sciences and Humanities in China. Houndsmill: McMillan, 1987.
Chang, Shi-kuo. “Realism in Taiwan Fiction: Two Directions.” In Faurot, Jeannette L., ed. Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980, 31-42.
Chen, Xiaoming. “The Disappearance of Truth: From Realism to Modernism in China.” In Chung, ed. In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Critical Studies no. 6. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, 158-65.
Chung, Hilary, ed. In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and China. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.
Duke, Michael S. “Chinese Literature in the Post-Mao Era: The Return of ‘Critical Realism.’” The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 16, 3 (1984): 2-5.
Huters, Theodore. “Ideologies of Realism in Modern China: The Hard Imperatives of Imported Theory.” In X. Tang and K. Liu, eds. Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique. Durham: Duke UP, 1993, 147-52.
Kinkley, Jeffrey C. “New Realism in Contemporary Chinese Literature” (review article). Journal Chinese Language Teachers Association 17, 1 (1982): 77-100.
—–. Corruption and Realism in Late Socialist China. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2007.
[Abstract: As China’s centrally planned economy and welfare state have given way to a more loosely controlled version of “late socialism,” public concern about economic reform’s downside has found expression in epic novels about official corruption and its effects. While the media shied away from dealing with these issues, novelists stepped in to fill the void. “Anti-corruption fiction” exploded onto the marketplace and into public consciousness, spawning popular films and television series until a clampdown after 2002 that ended China’s first substantial realist fiction since the 1989 Beijing massacre. With frankness and imagination seldom allowed journalists, novelists have depicted the death of China’s rust-belt industries, the gap between rich and poor, “social unrest”—i.e., riots—and the questionable new practices of entrenched communist party rulers. Corruption and Realism examines this rebirth of the Chinese political novel and its media adaptations, explaining how the works reflect contemporary Chinese life and how they embody Chinese traditions of social criticism, literary realism, and contemplation of taboo subjects. This is the first book to investigate such novels and includes excerpts from personal interviews with China’s three most famous anticorruption novelists.]
Larson, Wendy. “Realism, Modernism, and the Anti-‘Spiritual Pollution’ Campaign in Modern China.” Modern China15, 1 (Jan. 1989): 37-71.
—–. “Notes on the Chinese Modernism-Realism Debates.” Chinoperl Papers 20-22 (1997-99): 245-68.
Li, Qingquan. From Critical Realism to Socialist Realism: A Historical Survey of Realism in Modern Chinese Literature. New York: P. Lang, 1996.
Wang, Ban. “In Search of Real-Life Images in China: Realism in the Age of Spectacle.” Journal of Contemporary China 17 (56) (2008): 497-512.
Wang, David. Fictional Realism in Twentieth Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen. NY: Columbia UP, 1992.
Yang, Lan. “‘Socialist Realism’ versus ‘Revolutionary Realism plus Revolutionary Romanticism.’” In Chung, ed. In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Critical Studies no. 6. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, 88-105.
Dialect Literature
Altenburger, Roland. “Chains of Ghost Talk: Highlighting of Language, Distancing, and Irony in He Dian.” Asiatica Venetiana 6 (Feb. 2001): 23-46.
Cheung, Samuel Hung-min. Cantonese since the 19th Century. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Thanks to dedicated efforts of early missionaries, pedagogues, and linguists, we can trace back the evolution of modern Cantonese—one of the most spoken dialects in China, Southeast Asia, and globally—while differences in sounds, words, and grammar distinguish the old from contemporary speech today. Not much was recorded in official documents or gazetteers about the early history of Hong Kong where Cantonese is its most popular dialect. The knowledge of Cantonese is likewise quite limited except for occasional mentions of its culture and customs in writings here and there. For a long time, Cantonese was deemed a local dialect enjoying little prestige among the intellectuals. Its language and its origin remained much of a mystery until the mid-twentieth century when scholars started to accord it with increasing attention. Cheung offers profound insights to some thirty firsthand century-old materials, with findings that will be useful for ongoing efforts to trace the development of a language that has gone through many rounds of incredible and, at times dramatic, changes during the last two hundred years.]
Clementi, Cecil. Preface to Cantonese Love-Songs: Translated with Introduction. Clarendon: Oxford, 1904.
Dai, Yaoying. “The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai and Written Wu Topolect in the Late Qing Period.” Sino-Platonic Papers 283 (Dec. 2018): 23–45.
Duval, Jean. “The Nine-Tailed Turtle: Pornography or ‘Fiction of Exposure’?.” In Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova, ed., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980, 177-188.
Heylen, Ann. “The Written Taiwanese Movement.” In Heylen, Japanese Models, Chinese Culture and the Dilemma of Taiwanese Language Reform. Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014, 151-192.
Gao, Yunwen. “Sounding Shanghai: Sinophone Intermediality in Jin Yucheng’s Blossoms.” Concentric: Literacy & Cultural Studies, 2017 (43) 2.
Gunn, Edward. Rendering the Regional: Local Language in Contemporary Chinese Media. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006.
Hung, Chang-tai. Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918-1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1985.
Keulemans, Paize. “Printing the Sound of Cosmopolitan Beijing: Dialect Accents in Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction.” In Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed, eds., From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008. Leiden, Brill, 2010, 159-84.
—–. Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014.
Lin, Alvin. “Writing Taiwanese: The Development of Modern Written Taiwanese.” Sino-Platonic Papers 89 (1999): 1–52.
Liu, Jin. Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Liu, Jin. “A Historical Review of the Discourse of Fangyan in Modern China.” Twentieth-Century China 41, 3 (2016): 217-233.
Scruggs, Bert Mittchell. Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film. Hong Kong University Press, 2015.
Simmons, Richard VanNess, ed. Studies in Colloquial Chinese and Its History: Dialect and Text. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: presents cutting-edge research into issues regarding prestige colloquial languages in China in their spoken forms and as well as their relationship to written forms and the colloquial literary language. These include the standard regional languages and prestige dialects of the past, the influence of historical forms of spoken Chinese on written Chinese, the history of guānhuà and the history of báihuà, proto-dialects and supra-regional common languages (koines), and their relationship to spoken dialects. The various studies in this collection focus on the dialect groups with the most substantial written tradition, including Mandarin, Wu, Min, and Cantonese, in north, central and eastern coastal, and southern China respectively. The contributors explore the histories of these dialects in their written and spoken forms, presenting a variegated view of the history and development of the regional forms, including their evolution and influence. This edited volume expands our understanding of the underlying factors in the formation of supra-regional common languages in China, and the written forms to which they gave rise. It broadens our understanding of the evolution of written and spoken forms of Chinese from a comparative perspective, revealing the interrelationships of various areal forms of Chinese and historical koines in China.]
Snow, Don. “Chinese Dialect as Written Language: The Cases of Taiwanese and Cantonese.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 4, 1 (1993): 15-30.
—–. “A Short History of Published Cantonese: What Is a Dialect Literature.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 4.3 (1994): 127-148.
—–. Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004.
—–. “Towards a Theory of Vernacularisation: Insights from Written Chinese Vernaculars.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 34, 6 (2013): 597-610.
Snow, Don, and Chen Nuanling. “Missionaries and Written Chaoshanese.” Global Chinese 1, 1 (2015): 5-26.
Snow, Don, Zhou Xiayun, and Shen Senyao. “A Short History of Written Wu, Part I.” Global Chinese 4, 1 (2018): 143-166.
Snow, Don, Shen Senyao, and Zhou Xiayun. “A Short History of Written Wu, Part II: Written Shanghainese.” Global Chinese 4, 2 (2018): 217-246.
Starr, Chloe. Red-light Novels of the Late Qing. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Wong, Lorraine. “Threshold Nationhood: Huang Guliu’s The Story of Shrimp-ball, Chinese Latinization, and Topolect Literature.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30, 2 (Fall 2018): 216-266.
Yeung, Wayne C. F. “The Concept of the Cantophone: Memorandum for a Stateless Literary History.” Sino-Platonic Papers 334 (June 2023).
Children’s/Youth Literature
Bai, Limin. Shaping the Ideal Child: Children and Their Primers in Late Imperial China. HK: Chinese University Press, 2005.
Chang, Parrish H. “Children’s Literature and Political Socialization.” In Godwin Chu and Francis Hsu, eds., Moving a Mountain. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1979, 237-56.
Chen, Minjie. The Sino- Japanese War and Youth Literature: Friends and Foes on the Battlefield. London: Routledge, 2016.
[Abstract: The Sino-Japanese War (1937 – 1945) was fought in the Asia-Pacific theatre between Imperial Japan and China, with the United States as the latter’s major military ally. An important line of investigation remains, questioning how the history of this war has been passed on to post-war generations’ consciousness, and how information sources, particularly those exposed to young people in their formative years, shape their knowledge and bias of the conflict as well as World War II more generally. This book is the first to focus on how the Sino-Japanese War has been represented in non-English and English sources for children and young adults. As a cross-cultural study and an interdisciplinary endeavour, it not only examines youth-orientated publications in China and the United States, but also draws upon popular culture, novelists’ memoirs, and family oral narratives to make comparisons between fiction and history, Chinese and American sources, and published materials and private memories of the war. Through quantitative narrative analysis, literary and visual analysis, and socio-political critique, it shows the dominant pattern of war stories, traces chronological changes over the seven decades from 1937 to 2007, and teases out the ways in which the history of the Sino-Japanese War has been constructed, censored, and utilized to serve shifting agendas. Providing a much needed examination of public memory, literary representation, and popular imagination of the Sino-Japanese War, this book will have huge interdisciplinary appeal, particularly for students and scholars of Asian history, literature, society and education.]
Farquhar, Mary Ann. “Revolutionary Children’s Literature.” Australian Journal of Chinese Studies 4 (1980): 61-84.
—–. “Through the Looking Glass: Children’s Stories and Social Change in China, 1918-1976.” In Gungwu Wang, ed., Society and the Writer: Essays on Literature in Modern Asia. Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, 1981, 173-198.
—–. Children’s Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.
Foster, Kate. Chinese Literature and the Child: Children and Childhood in Late-Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
[Abstract: Chinese Literature and the Child is a far-reaching study of images of children in post-Cultural Revolution novels and short stories. Considering works from over twenty writers, including some of China’s leading literary stars, this book spans two decades of China’s recent and rapid transformation. Tracking ideas of the child in Chinese society across the twentieth century, Kate Foster places fictional children within the story of the nation in a study of tropes and themes which range from images of strength and purity to the murderous and amoral. In this ambitious and revealing study, Foster views China’s imagined children in relation to major shifts in Chinese culture and society and through literary theory, and argues convincingly for the significance of the child in fiction in the construction of adult identity in a time of change.]
Jones, Andrew F. “The Child as History in Republican China: A Discourse on Development.” positions 10, 3 (2002): 695-927.
Kinney, Anne Behnke, ed. Chinese Views of Childhood. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.
Pease, Catherine. “Remembering the Taste of Melons: Modern Chinese Stories of Childhood.” In Anne Behnke Kinney, ed., Chinese Views of Childhood. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995, 279-320.
Scott, Dorothea Hayward. Chinese Popular Literature and the Child. Chicago: American Library Association, 1980.
Woronov, T. E. “Performing the Nation: China’s Children as Little Red Pioneers.” Anthropological Quarterly 80, 3 (Summer 2007): 647-672.
Xu, Lanjun. Save the Children: Problem Childhoods and Narrative Politics in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature. Ph. D. diss. Princeton: Princeton University, 2011.
Xu Lanjun and Andrew F. Jones, eds. Ertong de faxian: Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue ji wenhua zhong de ertong wenti 儿童的发现: 现代中国文学及文化中的儿童问题 (Discovery of the child: the child issue in modern Chinese literature and culture). Beijing: Beijing daxue, 2011.
Zhao, Xia and Helen Wang. 2022. “Transnational Dialogues: Children’s Literature Across Borders.” Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature 1, 1: 82–101.
Internet Literature
Chao, Shih-Chen. “The Re-institutionalisation of Popular Fiction–The Internet and a New Model of Popular Fiction Prosumption in China.” Journal of the British Association of Chinese Studes 3 (Dec. 2013).
Chen, Jing. “Refashioning Print Literature: Internet Literature in China.” Comparative Literature Studies 49, 4 (2012): 537-546.
Day, Michael. “Poetry.” Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS), Leiden Division. [study of contemporary Chinese poetry websites]
Feng, Jin 冯进. “‘Addicted to Beauty’: Consuming and Producing Web-based Chinese Danmei Fiction at Jinjiang.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (Fall 2009): 1-41.
—–. “Cong Jinjiang danmei wen kan Zhongguo dangdai nuxing xingbie shenfen de goucheng” 从晋江耽美文看中国当代女性性别身份的构成 (Constructing female gender identities through Danmei at Jinjiang). Zhongguo xing yanjiu 30, 3 (2009): 132-153.
—–. Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
[Abstract: In Romancing the Internet, Jin Feng examines the evolution of Chinese popular romance on the Internet. She first provides a brief genealogy of Chinese Web literature and Chinese popular romance, and then investigates how large socio-cultural forces have shaped new writing and reading practices and created new subgenres of popular romance in contemporary China. Integrating ethnographic methods into literary and discursive analyses, Feng offers a gendered, audience-oriented study of Chinese popular culture in the age of the Internet.]
—–. “The Superhero and the Salted Fish: The Aesthetic of the Ordinary in “Doomsday” Chinese Web Fiction.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 3-4 (2022): 78-87.
[Abstract: In this article I take a close look at several representative Chinese web novels that apparently tell “ordinary tales of ordinary people” set in an apocalyptical universe. By examining their shared characteristics in setting, plot arc, and character development, I show that the current pandemic shapes the liminal space created in these “doomsday” (mori or moshi) novels and generates through them an aesthetic of the ordinary. This unique aesthetic follows decades-long trends in Chinese web fiction on the one hand, while on the other finding inspiration in the extraordinary historical moment we live in, as rising popularism in China wages war against “pandemic orientalism” abroad. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has become both the background and staging ground for these Chinese web authors and readers to perform self-maintenance and explore the meaning of life, the essence of their identity, and even the boundary between human and non-human forms. Given Chinese web fiction’s immediacy to lived experiences, responsiveness to contemporary socio-cultural events, and the speed and scope of self-reproduction and proliferation in Chinese cyber space, these works can also offer some clue to the trauma wrought by and still unfolding in the current pandemic.]
Fumian, Marco. “The Temple and the Market: Controversial Positions in the Literary Field with Chinese Characteristics.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (Fall 2009): 126-66.
Ge, Liang. “Problematizing Heteronormativity: Performativity, Resignification and A/B/O Fiction in Chinese Danmei Literature.” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 7, 2 (2021): 241-254.
[Abstract: The literary form of danmei, in which male–male romance and/or erotica is portrayed, is a flourishing genre in China which has received significant attention from academia in recent years. This article focuses on a notorious subgenre of danmei, A/B/O fiction, which introduces three additional sexes, alpha, beta and omega, into mankind, alongside the male/female binary sex/gender system. By focusing on a popular but atypical example of this subgenre, this study aims to contribute to the understanding of how female danmei writers constantly question the hierarchical and heteronormative system in the A/B/O world and interrogate the fixed identities of gender, sexuality and class, by imagining love, sex and intimacy among male protagonists. Drawing on Judith Butler’s gender performative theory and resignification politics, this article suggests that the behaviour of the characters in these texts engenders reciprocal and equal relationships, reverses the various heteropatriarchal norms through the employment of technology, and questions the compulsory regulatory power embodied in the biological pheromone in A/B/O. Simultaneously, this study also identifies the notion of ‘love’ itself as a limiting factor of this genre of male–male romantic and/or erotic writing.]
Gong, Haomin and Xin Yang. “Circulating Smallness on Weibo: The Dialectics of Microfiction.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 1 (March 2014): 181-202.
[Abstract: The focus of this essay is microfiction (wei xiaoshuo), a form of Weibo-based fiction writing. From the perspective of its most prominent feature—microness—the authors investigate the dialectical relationship between microness and largeness embodied in its form, the context of its emergence, the conditions of its existence, as well as the issues reflected in its content. Studying three disparate cases of microfiction writing, namely microfiction selected from contests hosted by Sina, Chen Peng’s personal Weibo posts, and Wen Huanjian’s Weibo novel, Love in the Age of Microblogging (Weibo shiqi de aiqing), we explore the cultural status of microfiction as a reflection of the combination of literary writing and online activities; and its aesthetic, literary, and cultural characteristics. Reading microfiction in both a literary and a sociocultural text, we argue that the smallness is an intrusion upon the largeness and hegemony of grand narratives on the one hand, and a reflection of a boradly changing reality on the other.]
Guo, Shaohua. “Startling by Each Click: ‘Word-of-Mouse’ Publicity and Critically Manufacturing Time-Travel Romance Online.” Chinese Literature Today 5, 1 (2015): 82-91.
Hockx, Michel. “Links with the Past: Mainland China’s Online Literary Communities and their Antecedents.” Journal of Contemporary China 13, 38 (Feb. 2004): 105-27. Rpt in Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 155-78.
[Abstract: This article compares Chinese literary journals from the early twentieth century with a Mainland Chinese literary website from the early twenty-first century. In both these periods, literary practice underwent significant changes as a result of major changes in the technological processes involved in the production and distribution of texts. Five aspects of these changes are examined: the mixed media environment, the provision of information about authors’ identities, engagement with social issues, community building, and the relationship with serious literature. The article argues that a very traditional Chinese view of literature as a socially embedded act of communication continued to play a significant role in both periods, and was even further enhanced through interaction with the new technologies. Despite the fact that both types of publication appeal(ed) to large readerships, it is argued that it is not helpful simply to consider them as ‘popular literature’. Both the journals from 100 years ago and the website of today represent literary communities that share a serious view of literature, albeit one that is not compatible with the familiar New Literature paradigm]
—–. “Virtual Chinese Literature: A Comparative Case Study of Online Poetry Communities.” The China Quarterly 183 (Sept. 2005): 670-691.
—–. “Master of the Web: Chen Cun and the Continuous Avant-Garde.” In Maghiel van Crevel, Tian Yuan Tan, and Michel Hockx, eds. Text, Performance, and Gender in Chinese Literature and Music: Essay in Honor of Wilt Idema. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009, 413-430.
—–. Internet Literature in China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
[Abstract: Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, this book presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still attempting to draw a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Readers interested in encountering these new forms of writing, some of which are no longer available online, will value this book. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China–and across Asia.]
—–. “From Writing to Roaming: World Literature and the Literary World of Black and Blue.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 203-16.
Inwood, Heather. On the Scene of Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Ph. D. dissertation. London: SOAS, 2008. [deals in part with poetry websites]
—–. Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.
[Abstract: examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Inwood sets out to unravel a paradox surrounding modern Chinese poetry: while poetry as a representation of high culture is widely assumed to be marginalized to the point of death, poetry activity flourishes across the country, benefiting from China’s continued self-identity as a “nation of poetry” (shiguo) and from the interactive opportunities created by the internet and other forms of participatory media. Through a cultural studies approach that treats poetry as a social rather than a purely textual form, Inwood considers how meaning is created and contested both within China’s media-savvy poetry scenes and by members of the public, who treat poetry with a combination of reverence and ridicule.]
—–. “Poetry for the People? Modern Chinese Poetry in the Age of the Internet.” Chinese Literature Today 5, 1 (Jan. 2015): 44-54.
—–. “Internet Literature: From YY to MOOC.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 436-40.
Kong, Shuyu. “The ‘Affective Alliance’: Undercover, Internet Media Fandom, and the Sociality of Cultural Consumption in Postsocialist China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 1 (Spring 2012): 1-47.
—–. Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China. London & New York: Routledge, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Hui Faye Xiao]
[Abstract: Since the early 1990s the media and cultural fields in China have become increasingly commercialized, resulting in a massive boom in the cultural and entertainment industries. This evolution has also brought about fundamental changes in media behaviour and communication, and the enormous growth of entertainment culture and the extensive penetration of new media into the everyday lives of Chinese people. Against the backdrop of the rapid development of China’s media industry and the huge growth in social media, this book explores the emotional content and public discourse of popular media in contemporary China. It examines the production and consumption of blockbuster films, television dramas, entertainment television shows, and their corresponding online audience responses, and describes the affective articulations generated by cultural and media texts, audiences and social contexts. Crucially, this book focuses on the agency of audiences in consuming these media products, and the affective communications taking place in this process in order to address how and why popular culture and entertainment programs exert so much power over mass audiences in China. Indeed, Shuyu Kong shows how Chinese people have sought to make sense of the dramatic historical changes of the past three decades through their engagement with popular media, and how this process has created a cultural public sphere where social communication and public discourse can be launched and debated in aesthetic and emotional terms. Based on case studies that range from television drama to blockbuster films, and reality television programmes to social media sites, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, media and communication studies, film studies and television studies.
Liu, Jin. “Subversive Writing: Li Xiaoguai’s Newly Coined Chinese Characters and His Comic Blogging.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 40 (2018).
Ouyang Youquan 欧阳友权. Wangluo wenxue lungang 网络文学论纲 (Thesis on internet literature). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 2003.
Rea, Christopher G. “Spoofing (E’gao) Culture on the Chinese Internet.” In Jessica Milner Davis and Jocelyn Chey, eds., Humor in Chinese Life and Letters: Volume 2, Modern and Contemporary Approaches. Hong Kong: HK University Press, 2013, 149-72.
Tian, Xi. “More than Conformity or Resistance: Chinese “Boys’ Love” Fandom in the Age of Internet Censorship.” The Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies 1 (2020).
[Abstract: One of the most popular literary and cultural practices particularly in the digital age, “boys’ love” (BL, danmei 耽美) manga and fictional works are fantasies on romantic or homoerotic male-male relationships, and therefore are often naturally associated with homosexuality and pornography, two “morally” suspicious targets of government censorship in the heteronormative Chinese culture. This article aims to examine the various, indeed often opposite, strategies and tactics taken by BL participants and by some conscientious netizens on popular social media to illustrate how those who are under the threat of censorship grapple with harsh reality. In this article I argue that the BL practitioners’ responses to Chinese government’s anti-pornography campaigns are not simply a passive or reluctant “reaction.” I will first study the web adaptation of Priest’s BL story Zhenhun, demonstrating Priest’s as well as her fans’ tactful collaboration with the consumer culture and willing conformity to official discourse. Forming a sharp contrast with Priest’s commercial success, the controversial ten-year jail sentence of another BL writer, Gouwazi Tianyi, for profiting from producing and selling BL fiction has caused widespread outcry from both BL fans and ordinary netizens on Chinese social media. This case not only questions the dated criminal laws on obscene articles, but also challenges the patriarchal and problematic social institutions.]
Tian, Xiaofei. “Slashing the Three Kingdoms: A Case Study of Fan Production on the Chinese Web.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 27, 1 (Spring 2015): 224-77.
Wang, Yiwen. “Chinese Internet Fictions in the Transmedia World.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. NY: Routledge, 2023, 377-87.
Xu, Shuang. “Traveling through Time and Searching for Utopia: Utopian Imaginaries in Internet Time-Travel Fiction.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10, 1 (2016): 113-32.
[Abstract: The time-travel genre of Chinese Internet literature combines old mythological motifs with contemporary science fiction approaches to create a narrative line in which the protagonist travels through time, undergoes a series of trials, discovers new worlds, and realizes an idealized life. Borrowing Foucault’s theory of utopian bodies and heterotopias and taking Tianxia Guiyuan’s female-oriented Internet novel Empress Fuyao as its exemplary case, this study analyzes how time-travel fiction uses time travel in order to image a “utopia” and what kind of “new world” is projected by this utopia. In the process, this paper will simultaneously examine the relationship between utopia and twenty-first century China’s new media literature.]
Yang, Guobin. “Chinese Internet Literature and the Changing Field of Print Culture.” In Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed, eds., From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008. Leiden, Brill, 2010, 333-52.
Yang, Ling. “‘The World of Grand Union’: Engendering Trans/nationalism via Boys’ Love in Online Chinese Hetalia Fandom.” In Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao, eds., Boys; Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017, 45-62.
Yang, Ling and Yanrui Xu. “Queer Texts, Gendered Imagination, and Grassroots Feminism in Chinese Web Literature.” In Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, Willam F. Schroeder, and Hongwei Bao, eds., Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2015, 131-52.
—–. “Chinese Danmei Fandom and Cultural Globalization from Below.” In Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao, eds., Boys; Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017, 3-19.
Yang, Zhiyi and Ma Dayong. “Classicism 2.0: The Vitality of Classicist Poetry Online in Contemporary China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12, 3 (2018): 526-57.
[Abstract: In this paper, we examine the various approaches toward literary classicism among contemporary Chinese poets. If “poetry of the establishment” features ideological conservatism and aesthetic populism, then its opposite is the online scene of classicist poetry which represents an innovative continuation of the poetic tradition. Here such innovations are discussed in terms of theme, language, and form. Thematic innovations include further that of ideology, worldview, and urbanity. In particular, we argue that a major distinction between contemporary online classicist poets and their premodern predecessors is in their cultural identity. Unlike a traditional literatus who is a poet, scholar, and bureaucrat, contemporary poets often endure economic, intellectual, or political marginalization; or at the very least, writing in the marginalized genre of classicist poetry is a skill that can no longer be readily translated into career success. This new type of poetic identity, in addition to their modern education, has given rise to fresh interpretations of our living world unseen in premodern poetry. Despite their broad spectrum of intellectual persuasions and aesthetic preferences, most of the poets have demonstrated an audacity to experiment, which, coupled with full versatility and virtuosity in the classical poetry tradition, creates outstanding poems. The highly original works of a few leading classicist poets like Lizilizilizi (Zeng Shaoli), Xutang (Duan Xiaosong), and Dugu Shiroushou (Zeng Zheng) will be examined in depth.]
Zhang, Chunyu. “Loving Boys Twice as Much: Chinese Women’s Paradoxical Fandom of ‘Boys’ Love’ Fiction.” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, 3 (2016): 249-267.
Zuccheri, Serena. Letteratura web in Cina. Rome: Nuove Edizioni Romane, 2008.
Translation Studies (see also “Diaspora, Exile, Transnational, Sinophone, World Literature“)
Alleton, Viviane. “The Migration of Grammars Through Languages: The Chinese Case.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 211-38.
Bachner, Andrea. “Cultural Margins, Hybrid Scripts: Bigraphism and Translation in Indigenous Taiwanese Writing.” Journal of World Literature 1, 2 (2016): 226-244.
—–. “World-Literature Hospitality: China, Latin American, Translation.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 103-121.
Bai, Liping. “‘Translator Studies’: Liang Shiqiu’s Discoure on Translation.” Across Languages and Cultures 12, 1 (2011): 71-94.
[Abstract: Liang Shiqiu is a prominent translator in 20th century China. This article offers an analysis of his direct and indirect discourse on translation. It demonstrates that Liang’s discourse on translation, including attitudes to and functions of translation, faithfulness and appropriate degree of literalism, is in line with his discourse on literature, culture and some traditional Confucian ideas like ‘cheng’, ‘li’ and ‘zhongyong’. It is fascinating to discover that Liang’s attitude toward the value of traditional Chinese thinking, particularly Confucianism, at a time when it was strongly denounced during the New Culture Movement, was greatly influenced by Irving Babbitt, his teacher at Harvard.]
Barrett, T. H. and Lawrence Wang-chi Wong, eds. Crossing Borders: Sinology in Translation Studies. HK: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2022.
[Abstract: Sinologists have long been at the forefront of cultural exchanges between China and the West, and translation is a necessary pre-condition for their intercultural exchange. This book merges the academic fields of translation studies and sinology, to gain greater insights into how Chinese works have been transmitted across cultural and linguistic borders, and how translation has enabled global scholarship on Chinese culture from the Ming-Qing period to the twentieth century.]
Bartsch, Shadi. Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.
Behr, Wolfgang. “‘To Translate’ is ‘To Exchange’: Linguistic Diversity and the Terms for Translation in Ancient China.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 173-210.
Berry, Michael. Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Transpacific Cyber Campaign. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
[Abstract: During the early days of the COVID-19 health crisis, Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary provided an important portal for people around the world to understand the outbreak, local response, and how the novel coronavirus was impacting everyday people. But when news of the international publication of Wuhan Diary appeared online in early April of 2020, Fang Fang’s writings became the target of a series of online attacks by “Chinese ultra-nationalists.” Over time, these attacks morphed into one of the most sophisticated and protracted hate Campaigns against a Chinese writer in decades. Meanwhile, as controversy around Wuhan Diary swelled in China, the author was transformed into a global icon, honored by the BBC as one of the most influential women of 2020 and featured in stories by dozens of international news outlets. This book, by the translator of Wuhan Diary into English, alternates between a first-hand account of the translation process and more critical observations on how a diary became a lightning rod for fierce political debate and the target of a sweeping online campaign that many described as a “cyber Cultural Revolution.” Eventually, even Berry would be pulled into the attacks and targeted by thousands of online trolls. This book answers the questions: why would an online lockdown diary elicit such a strong reaction among Chinese netizens? How did the controversy unfold and evolve? Who was behind it? And what can we learn from the “Fang Fang Incident” about contemporary Chinese politics and society? The book will be of interest to students and scholars of translation, as well as anyone with special interest in translation, US-Chinese relations, or internet culture more broadly.]
Bing, Ngeow Chow. “From Translation House to Think Tank: The Changing Role of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Compilation and Translation Bureau.” Journal of Contemporary China 34 (93) (May 2015): 554-572.
Bruno, Cosima. Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation. Leiden: Brill. 2012.
[Abstract: Bruno illustrates how the study of translation can enhance our experience of reading poetry. By inquiring into the mutual dependence of the source text and its translation, the study offers both theoretical insights and methodological tools that bring in-depth stylistic analysis to bear on the translations as against the originals. Through such a process of discovery, Cosima Bruno elaborates a textual exegesis of the work by Yang Lian, one of the most translated, and critically acclaimed contemporary Chinese poets. This book thus reconciles the theory-practice divide in translation studies, as well as helps to dismantle the lingering Eurocentrism still present in the discipline.]
—–. “The Public Life of Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English Translation.” Target 24, 2 (2012): 253-85.
[Abstract: This essay is an exploration of some of the social and cultural factors that have played a role in the production, publication and reception of English translations of contemporary Chinese poetry, from the beginning of the 1980s to today. The aim is to link translations to the broader context, highlighting modalities and expectations of reception that have evolved within the social structures through which the translation of contemporary Chinese poetry has been circulating: the publishing industry, universities, the periodical press, public intellectual debates, and the market. The article does not try to establish if this or that expectation are either real or perceived features of the source texts. Nor does it deal with translators’ individual interpretations, their private readings. Instead, adopting a wider sociocultural approach, the analysis proposes to shed light on the industrial and commercial dimension — the public life — of contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation.]
—–. “Words by the Look: Experiments in Translating Chinese Visual Poetry.” In James StAndre, ed., China and Its Others: Knowledge Transfer and Representations of China and the West. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2012, 245-76.
—–. “Dog Barking at the Moon: Transcreation of a Meme in Art and Poetry.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14,2/15,1 (Winter 2017/Summer 2018): 161-86.
[Abstract: This essay explores the dynamics of transcreation in art and poetry, focusing on the image of a dog barking at the moon in four Taiwanese poems. By putting them in connection with each other and with other texts from different times and artistic traditions, I wish to contribute to a dismantling of the “influence paradigm,” move beyond contestations over the comparative approach, and demonstrate a critical method that recognizes the enduring fascination for the meme but equally appreciates change, approximation and adaptation, rather than closed-off conversion from a source text to a target text.]
Bruno, Cosima, Lucas Klein, and Chris Song, eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
[Abstract: Offering the first systematic overview of modern and contemporary Chinese literature from a translation studies perspective, this handbook provides students, researchers and teachers with a context in which to read and appreciate the effects of linguistic and cultural transfer in Chinese literary works. Translation matters. It always has, of course, but more so when we want to reap the benefits of intercultural communication. In many universities Chinese literature in English translation is taught as if it had been written in English. As a result, students submit what they read to their own cultural expectations; they do not read in translation and do not attend to the protocols of knowing, engagements and contestations that bind literature and society to each other. The Handbook squarely addresses this pedagogical lack. Organised in a tripartite structure around considerations of textual, social, and large-scale spatial and historical circumstances, its thirty plus essays each deal with a theme of translation studies, as emerged from the translation of one or more Chinese literary works. In doing so, it offers new tools for reading and appreciating modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the global context of its translation, offering in-depth studies about eminent Chinese authors and their literary masterpieces in translation.]
Cao, Shou and Min Cong. “A Study of Translation Strategy in Eileen Chang’s The Golden Cangue from the Perspective of Feminist Translation Theory.” Cross-Cultural Communication 13, 8 (2017): 32-39.
Chan, Leo Tak-hung. “What’s Modern in Chinese Translation Theory? Lu Xun and the Debates on Literalism and Foreignization in the May Fourth Period.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie et Redaction 14, 2 (2001).
—– ed. One into Many: Translation and the Dissemination of Classical Chinese Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003.
Chang, Nam Fung. “Does ‘Translation’ Reflect a Narrower Concept than ‘Fanyi’? On the Impact of Western Theories on China and the Concern about Eurocentrism.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 10, 2 (2015): 223-42.
Chen, Hong-shu. “Chinese Whispers: A Story Translated from Italian to English to Japanese and, Finally, to Chinese.” Journal of the History of Ideas in East Asia (東亞觀念史集刊) (June 2015).
[Abstract: Bao Tianxiao (包天笑, 1876-1973) translated a number of education novels (教育小說) during the late Qing dynasty, among them Xin’s Journal about School Life (馨兒就學記) being the most renowned. It is known that the novel was translated indirectly from a Japanese translation of the Italian novel Cuore. Bao’s first education novel, Children’s Moral Cultivation (兒童修身之感情), is also based on a story in Cuore, though it was translated indirectly from another Japanese translation by Hara Hōitsuan (原抱一庵, 1866-1904), which was itself translated from an English translation by Isabel F. Hapgood (1850-1928) of the 39th Italian edition of Cuore. These successive translations constitute an intriguing case in translation history. Under the influence of the traditional concept of faithfulness, the notion of relay translation has often been laden with negative connotations, thus the study of relay translation has received little attention. However, it is undeniable that relay translation greatly contributed to the introduction of Western knowledge to late-Qing China and Meiji Japan, suggesting that the study of relay translation is indeed valuable. Prospective research may trace the translation route and attempt to depict the details of the relay process, whether the texts have been changed, what styles the translators have inherited, and what phenomena the evolution reflects. This study attempts to answer these questions through close reading and text comparison. It concludes with four observations as the primary results: 1) literal translation and appropriation happens more readily between similar languages; 2) preferences for archaic style indicate similarity among the translators; 3) effects of dramatic repetition have been accumulated and magnified; 4) omissions and mistranslations of one translator are unavoidably repeated in the following translators’ works, except when such mistakes are too obvious to ignore. The game “Chinese Whispers” is used as a metaphor to describe the relay process in which each player tries to re-present the information and style of the player before them. Closer similarity between languages and players’ preferences may contribute to a better re-presentation of the message, which may be one analogy suggesting why the final Chinese version does not differ largely from the Italian original. However dismissive our impression of relay translation has been, it undeniably has opened up more paths for cultural exchange, while not necessarily resulting in major differences in the end products. Looking deeper into the circumstances of these indirect translations may give us reasons enough to revise our long-held negative view of relay translation.]
Cheung, Martha Pui Yui. An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project. Vol. 1. London: Routledge, 2006.
[Abstract: Translation has a long history in China. Down the centuries translators, interpreters, Buddhist monks, Jesuit priests, Protestant missionaries, writers, historians, linguists, and even ministers and emperors have all written about translation, and from an amazing array of perspectives. Such an exciting diversity of views, reflections and theoretical thinking about the art and business of translating is now brought together in a two-volume anthology. The first volume covers a time-frame from roughly the 5th century BCE to the twelfth century CE. It deals with translation in the civil and government context, and with the monumental project of Buddhist sutra translation. The second volume spans the 13th century CE to the Revolution of 1911, which brought an end to feudal China. It deals with the transmission of Western learning to China – a translation venture that changed the epistemological horizon and even the mindset of Chinese people. Comprising over 250 passages, most of which are translated into English for the first time here, the anthology is the first major source book to appear in English. It carries valuable primary material, allowing access into the minds of translators working in a time and space markedly different from ours, and in ways foreign or even inconceivable to us. The topics these writers discussed are familiar. But rather than a comfortable trip on well-trodden ground, the anthology invites us on an exciting journey of the imagination.]
—–. An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation: From the Twelfth Century to 1800. Vol. 2. London: Routledge, 2020.
[Abstract: Translation has a long history in China. Down the centuries translators, interpreters, Buddhist monks, Jesuit priests, Protestant missionaries, writers, historians, linguists, and even ministers and emperors have all written about translation, and from an amazing array of perspectives. This second volume of the seminal two-volume anthology spans the 13th century CE to the very beginning of the nineteenth century with an entry dated circa 1800. It deals mainly with the transmission of Western learning to China – a translation venture that changed the epistemological horizon and even the mindset of Chinese people. Also included are texts that address translation between Chinese and the languages of China’s Central Asian neighbours, such as Manchu, which was to become of crucial importance in the Qing Dynasty. Comprising 28 passages, most of which are translated into English for the first time here, the anthology is the first major source book of its kind to appear in English. It features valuable primary material, and is essential reading for postgraduate students and researchers working in the areas of Translation, Translation Studies and Asian Studies.]
Chi, Ta-wei. “Negotiations between the Queer and the Literary: Translations of Chinese-Language Queer Literature.” In Cosima Bruno, Lucas Klein, and Chris Song, eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
“Chinese Poetry and Translation: Moving the Goal Posts.” Guest editor Maghiel van Crevel. Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14,2/15,1 (Winter 2017/Summer 2018).
Deng, Jin. “Eileen Chang’s Translation of ‘The Golden Cangue.’” Translation Journal 11, 4 (Oct. 2007).
Dutrait, Noël. “Quelques problèmes rencontrés dans la traduction de la littérature chinoise contemporaine.” In Nicolta, Pesaro, ed., The Ways of Translation: Constraints and Liberties of Translating Chinese. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2013, 109-117.
[Abstract: deals with the translation of some contemporary Chinese authors, such as Acheng, Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Gao Xingjian, etc.]
Fan, Shengyu. The Tranlator’s Mirror for the Romantic: Cao Xueqin’s Dream and David Hawkes’ Stone. Routledge, 2023.
[Abstract: a book that uses precious primary sources to decipher a master translator’s art in Stone, a brilliant English translation of the most famous Chinese classic novel Dream. This book demonstrates a bilingual close reading which sheds light on both the original and its translation. By dividing the process of translation into reading, writing, and revising, and involving the various aspects of Sinological research, textual criticism, recreation, and literary allusions, this book ventures to emphasise the idea of translation as a dialogue between the original and the translated text, between the translator and his former self, and a learning process both for the translator and the reader of his translation.]
Fang, Weigui. “Zeitgeist and Literature: The Reception of Chinese Literature in Germany Until the First Half of the Twentieth Century.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 35-48.
Farquhar, Mary Ann. “Lu Xun and the World of Children.” In Farquhar, Children’s Literature in China from Lu Xun to Mao Zedong. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999, 26-90. [contains discussion of Lu Xun’s late Qing and May Fourth involvement in translation of children’s literature]
Feeley, Jennifer. “Can We Say an Ear of Cabbage: On Translating Wordplay in Xi Xi’s Poetry.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14,2/15,1 (Winter 2017/Summer 2018): 45-72.
[Abstract: This article reflects on the translation of wordplay in the poetry of Hong Kong author Xi Xi. Xi Xi is a highly imaginative poet: much of her poetry hinges upon specificities of the Chinese language, and one might well ask if this makes her work “untranslatable.” This article identifies various techniques for translating Xi Xi’s wordplay, detailing how I mine the potential of English for ways to recreate Xi Xi’s puns, puzzles, and playful subversion of language in a new linguistic and cultural environment. It encourages readers and translators to become unshackled from rules, assumptions, and conventions as they reflect on the malleability and potential of poetry and of language itself.]
Fiss, Geraldine. “1905: Munchhausen Travels to China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 196-201.
Fung, Chang Nam. “Faithfulness, Manipulatioan, and Ideology: A Descriptive Study of Chinese Translation Tradition.” Perspectives 6, 2 (1998): 235-58.
Gamsa, Mark. The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature: Three Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2008. [MCLC Resource Center review by Roy Chan]
[Abstract: The important place of Russian literature in China is widely acknowledged. To better understand the processes of its translation, transmission and interpretation during the first half of the 20th century, this book draws on an array of Chinese and Russian sources, providing insight into the interplay of political ideologies, cultural trends, commercial forces, and the self-definition of Chinese culture in the period under consideration. By focusing on the translation and translators of three writers, Boris Savinkov, Mikhail Artsybashev and Leonid Andreev, it analyzes the critical fortune in China of the modernist literature written in Russia during the two decades preceding the Great War and Revolution. Offering a thorough study of Lu Xun, the most important Chinese author of the 20th century, as a reader, translator and interpreter of Russian literature, this book also displays the variety of the groups and persons involved in the introduction of foreign literature, going beyond shopworn generalizations about “East” and “West” to make meaningful statements about a complex period in Chinese history.]
—–. “The Translation of Russian Literature in Republican China.” IIAS Newsletter 35 (Nov. 2004): 19.
—–. “Translation and Alleged Plagiarism of Russian Literature in Republican China.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 33 (2011): 151–71.
—–. “Cultural Translation and the Transnational Circulation of Books.” Journal of World History 22, 3 (Sept. 2011): 553–75.
Gao, Yangsheng. “Translation as Vaccination: The Political Dialectics of Translation under Chairman Mao.” Translation Studies 10, 1 (2017): 38-53.
[Abstract: In Chairman Mao’s era, the politics of Chinese translation in general and literary translation in particular was played out in various and often incomprehensible forms. This was largely due to Mao’s conception of translation as political vaccination, which was derived from his political dialectics that had, in turn, been developed from diverse political and philosophical sources. By revisiting what actually happened to translation in the China of the time, the article examines Mao’s problematic and self-contradictory dialectics that constituted the larger Chinese context, which created different dimensions of the politics of translation, in an attempt to draw attention to what might be termed the political dialectics of translation.]
Gerber, Leah and Lintao Qi, eds. A Century of Chinese Literature in Translation (1919-2019): English Publication and Reception. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Haiyan Xie]
[Abstract: This book delves into the Chinese literary translation landscape over the last century, spanning critical historical periods such as the Cultural Revolution in the greater China region.Contributors from all around the world approach this theme from various angles, providing an overview of translation phenomena at critical historical moments, identifying the trends of translation and publication, uncovering translation norms of important works, elucidating the relationship between translators and other agents, articulating the interaction between texts and readers, and in short, disclosing the nature of literary migration from Chinese into English. This volume aims at benefiting both academics of translation studies from a dominantly Anglophone culture and researchers in the greater China region. Chinese scholars of translation studies will not only find in this volume a dedicated reference book, they will also find the contrast, confluence and communication/conference between the research by local academics and their global colleagues potentially stimulating, inspiring, and ultimately transformative. Table of Contents: Introduction by Leah Gerber and Lintao Qi; 1. Archival Research as Method: A Study of ‘Non-professional’ Agents of Literary Translation by Lintao Qi and Leah Gerber; 2. Unpacking the Mo Yan Archive: Actor-Network Translation Studies and The Chinese Literature Translation Archive by Jonathan Stalling and Ronald Schleifer; 3. Intuition and Spontaneity in Multiple Voice Literary Translation: Collaboration by Accident or by Design by Bonnie S. McDougall; 4. Gift-giving: Panda Books Series and Chinese Literature “Walking toward the World” by Geng Qiang; 5. Regarding Lady Precious Stream: A Theatrical Translation by Nicholas Jose; 6. A Descriptive Study of Lu Xun’s Short Stories in the English-Speaking World — with Focus on Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang’s Translation by Xin Hongjuan; 7. A Study of Contrasting Translatorial Methodologies in Ida Pruitt and Lao She’s Co-Translation of The Yellow Storm by Zhang Man; 8. Strategizing Hong Kong literature in the world: Self-collaborative Translating Dung Kai Cheung’s Atlas by Uganda Sze-pui Kwan; 9. English Translation of Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out: A Cognitive Narratology Perspective by Shao Lu; 10. Transferring the Self-Reflexive Function: Translation of Chinese Metafictions by Will Gatherer; 11. On Translating Between Languages by Carlos Rojas; 12. Translating Yu Hua by Allan H. Barr]
Goodman, Eleanor. “Translating Migrant Worker Poetry: Whose Voices Get Heard and How?” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14,2/15,1 (Winter 2017/Summer 2018): 107-27.
[Abstract: Translation involves the art of knowing when to get out of the way—and of knowing when to get in the way. Chinese migrant worker poetry brings this issue to the fore with unusual urgency, as its language often breaks the rules for being “poetic” or “elegant.” But what is being conveyed by the language these poets employ, and what is lost if the translator yields to the temptation to smooth out the rough edges? And how does the act of translating and anthologizing these poets affect the ways in which they are read?]
Gottardo, Maria. “Colorful Words with a Clanging Sound: Descriptive Adjectives in Zhang Ailing’s Short Stories.” In Nicoletta Pesaro, ed.. The Ways of Translation: Constraints and Liberties of Translating Chinese. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2013, 87-106.
Granade, Ray and Tom Geer. “Translating China to the American South: Baptist Missionaries and Imperial China, 1845-1911.” In Eva Hung, ed. Translation and Cultural Change: Studies in History, Norms and Image-Projection. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005, 65-90.
Green, Frederik H. “Translating Poetic Modernity: Zhou Zuoren’s Interest in Modern Japanese Poetry.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 11, 1 (2013): 138-61.
—–. “Rooted in Tradition, Embracing Modernity: Zhou Zuoren’s Interest in Modern Japanese Haiku and Tanka and His Promotion of Short Verse in China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12, 3 (2018): 424-48.
[Abstract: When late Qing and early Republican-period Chinese reformers grappled with the challenges of creating a new poetic language and form in the early decades of the twentieth century, Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), one of modern China’s most influential intellectuals, believed that much could be learned from the experiments of modern Japanese poets who had overcome similar challenges in the decades following the Meiji restoration. Of all the verse forms Japanese poets were experimenting with, Zhou was particularly interested in modern haiku and tanka. Zhou felt that the modern haiku and tanka’s rootedness in tradition on the one hand and their ability to express modern sensibilities on the other could offer a model for Chinese poets seeking to create a poetic voice that was at once modern, but also anchored in traditional poetics. This article will analyze some of Zhou’s translations of modern haiku and tanka and illustrate how these translations led him to promote a new poetic form in China, typically referred to as “short verse” (xiaoshi). By further reading Zhou’s critical essays on modern Japanese poetry against the writings of a number of Western modernist poets and translators who themselves were inspired by East Asian verse forms—Ezra Pound in particular—I will comment on the degree to which Zhou’s promotion of short verse inspired by modern Japanese haiku and tanka challenges a perceived Western role in legitimizing East Asian forms as conducive to modernism.]
Guo, Li, Patricia Sieber, and Peter Kornicki, eds. Ecologies of Translation in East and Southeast Asia, 1600-1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: This ground-breaking volume on early modern inter-Asian translation examines how translation from plain Chinese was situated at the nexus between, on the one hand, the traditional standard of biliteracy characteristic of literary practices in the Sinographic sphere, and on the other, practices of translational multilingualism (competence in multiple spoken languages to produce a fully localized target text). Translations from plain Chinese are shown to carve out new ecologies of translations that not only enrich our understanding of early modern translation practices across the Sinographic sphere, but also demonstrate that the transregional uses of a non-alphabetic graphic technology call for different models of translation theory.]
Guo, Ting. “Translation and Activism: Translators in the Chinese Communist Movement in the 1920s-30s.” In Pieter Boulogne, ed., Translation and Its Others: Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in Translation Studies (2007).
Gvili, Gal. Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895-1962. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: Gvili examines how Chinese writers’ image of India shaped the making of a new literature and spurred efforts to achieve literary decolonization. She argues that multifaceted visions of Sino-Indian connections empowered Chinese literary figures to resist Western imperialism and its legacies through novel forms and genres. However, Gvili demonstrates, the Global North and its authority mediated Chinese visions of Sino-Indian pasts and futures.]
Han, Jianming. “On Annotation in Translation.” In Eva Hung, ed. Translation and Cultural Change: Studies in History, Norms and Image-Projection. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005, 183-90.
Harrison, Henrietta. The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Hashimoto, Satoru. “1900: February 10: Liang Qichao’s Suspended Translation and the Future of Chinese Fiction.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 161-66.
He, Chengzhou. “World Literature as Event: Ibsen and Modern Chinese Fiction.” Comparative Literature Studies 54, 1 (2017): 141-160.
He, Xianbin. “Power Relations and Translation Inequality in China.” Hermēneus: Revista de Traducción e Interpretación 9 (2007): 1-12.
Heijns, Audrey. The Role of Henri Borel in Chinese Translation History. NY: Routledge, 2020.
[Abstract: Against the historical background of Chinese translation in the West and the emergence of several prominent European translators of China, this book examines the role of a translator in terms of cross-cultural communication, the image of the foreign culture in the minds of the target audience, and the influence of their translations on the target culture. With the focus on the career and output of the Dutch translator Henri Borel (1869–1933), this study investigates different aspects of the role of translator. The investigation is carried out by analysing texts and probing the achievements and contributions of the translator, underpinned by documents from the National Archives and the Literature Museum in the Hague, the Netherlands. Based on the findings derived from this study, advice is offered to those now involved in the promotion and translation of Chinese culture and literature. It will make an important contribution to the burgeoning history of Chinese translation. This book will be of interest to anyone with an interest or background in the translation history of China, the history of sinology in the West, and the role of translators.]
Henning, Stefan. “God’s Translator: Qu’ran Translation and the Struggle over a Written National Language in 1930s China.” Modern China 41, 6 (2015): 631-655.
[Abstract: Translation was crucial to the formation of Chinese modernity. While scholarship has centered on the translation of Western texts, I present here a case of translation from a non-Western context: the translation of the Qur’an into Chinese. Translating the Qur’an—fourteen times in the twentieth century—was a strategic intervention into the relations between Muslims and China’s non-Muslim majority as well as between Muslims and the Chinese state. I analyze why the first Chinese Qur’an translations in the twentieth century were accomplished by non-Muslims and how the decision to translate among Muslims followed from an internal critique of Muslim collective life in China. In a close reading of an essay from 1931 on Qur’an translation in China by a friend and collaborator of a Chinese Qur’an translator, I seek to identify the strategic risks and the strategic promises inherent in translating the Qur’an in Republican China by situating the translation in between the international and the national, alterity and self-same, and God and the secular.]
Heroldova, Helena. “Glass Submarines and Electric Balloons: Creating Scientific and Technical Vocabulary in Chinese Science Fiction.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 537-54.
Hill, Michael. “No True Men in the State: Pseudo/translation and ‘Feminine’ Voice in the Late Qing.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese / Xiandai Zhongwen wenxue xuebao 現代中文文學學報 10, no. 2 (Dec. 2011): 125–148.
—–. Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013 (paperback 2015). [MCLC Resource Center Review by Denise Gimpel]
[Abstract: How could a writer who knew no foreign languages call himself a translator? How, too, did he become a major commercial success, churning out nearly two hundred translations over twenty years? Lin Shu, Inc. crosses the fields of literary studies, intellectual history, and print culture, offering new ways to understand the stakes of translation in China and beyond. With rich detail and lively prose, Hill shows how Lin Shu (1852-1924) rose from obscurity to become China’s leading translator of Western fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. Well before Ezra Pound’s and Bertolt Brecht’s “inventions” of China revolutionized poetry and theater, Lin Shu and his assistants–who did, in fact, know languages like English and French–had already given many Chinese readers their first taste of fiction from the United States, France, and England. After passing through Lin Shu’s “factory of writing,” classic novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Oliver Twist spoke with new meaning for audiences concerned with the tumultuous social and political change facing China. Leveraging his success as a translator of foreign books, Lin Shu quickly became an authority on traditional Chinese culture who upheld the classical language as a cornerstone of Chinese national identity. Eventually, younger intellectuals–who had grown up reading his translations–turned on Lin Shu and tarred him as a symbol of backward conservatism. Ultimately, Lin’s defeat and downfall became just as significant as his rise to fame in defining the work of the intellectual in modern China.]
—–. “1901: Eliza Cross the Ice – and an Ocean – and Uncle Toms’ Cabin Arrives in China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017, 173-178.
Hoefle, Arnhilt Johanna. China’s Stefan Zweig: The Dynamics of Cross-Cultural Reception. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018.
[Abstract: During his lifetime Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was among the most widely read German-language writers in the world. Always controversial, he fell into critical disfavor as writers and critics in a devastated postwar Europe attacked the poor literary quality of his works and excoriated his apolitical fiction as naïve Habsburg nostalgia. Yet in other parts of the world, Zweig’s works have enjoyed continued admiration and popularity, even canonical status. China’s Stefan Zweig unveils the extraordinary success of Zweig’s novellas in China, where he has been read in an entirely different way. During the New Culture Movement of the 1920s, Zweig’s novellas were discovered by intellectuals turning against Confucian tradition. In the 1930s, left-wing scholars criticized Zweig as a decadent bourgeois writer, yet after the communist victory in 1949 he was re-introduced as a political writer whose detailed psychological descriptions exposed a brutal and hypocritical bourgeois capitalist society. In the 1980s, after the Cultural Revolution, Zweig’s works triggered a large-scale “Stefan Zweig fever,” where Zweig-style female figures, the gentle, loving, and self-sacrificing women who populate his novels, became the feminine ideal. Zweig’s seemingly anachronistic poetics of femininity allowed feminists to criticize Maoist gender politics by praising Zweig as “the anatomist of the female heart.” As Arnhilt Hoefle makes clear, Zweig’s works have never been passively received. Intermediaries have actively selected, interpreted, and translated his works for very different purposes. China’s Stefan Zweig not only re-conceptualizes our understanding of cross-cultural reception and its underlying dynamics, but proposes a serious re-evaluation of one of the most successful yet misunderstood European writers of the twentieth century. Zweig’s works, which have inspired recent film adaptations such as Xu Jinglei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (2005) and Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), are only beginning to be rediscovered in Europe and North America, but the heated debate about his literary merit continues. This book, with its wealth of hitherto unexplored Chinese-language sources, sheds light on the Stefan Zweig conundrum through the lens of his Chinese reception to reveal surprising, and long overlooked, literary dimensions of his works.
Hon, Tze-ki. “1922, March: Turning Babbitt into Bai Bide.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 277-82.
Hsu, Sheng-chi. “Translation Matters: The Case of The Butcher’s Wife in English.” In Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds., Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, 189-203.
Hu, Ying. “Nora in China.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. NY: Routledge, 2023, 288-96.
Huang, Alexa. “2011, June 26: Encountering Shakespeare’s Plays in the Sinophone World.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 924-30.
—–. [Joubin, Alexa Alice]. Shakespeare and East Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Huang, Libo. Style in Translation: A Corpus-based Perspective. Heidelberg: Springer, 2015.
[Abstract: This book attempts to explore style—a traditional topic—in literary translation with a corpus-based approach. A parallel corpus consisting of the English translations of modern and contemporary Chinese novels is introduced and used as the major context for the research. The style in translation is approached from perspectives of the author/the source text, the translated texts and the translator. Both the parallel model and the comparable model are employed and a multiple-complex model of comparison is proposed. The research model, both quantitative and qualitative, is duplicable within other language pairs. Apart from the basics of corpus building, readers may notice that literary texts offer an ideal context for stylistic research and a parallel corpus of literary texts may provide various observations to the style in translation. In this book, readers may find a close interaction between translation theory and practice. Tables and figures are used to help the argumentation. The book will be of interest to postgraduate students, teachers and professionals who are interested in corpus-based translation studies and stylistics.]
Huang, Max K.W. “Translating Liberalism into China in the Early Twentieth Century: The Case of Yan Fu.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 182-200.
Huang, Yunte and Hangping Xu, eds. “Translatability and Transmediality: Chinese Poetry in/and the World,” special issue of Prism 20, 1 (2023).
Hui, Isaac. “Translating Hong Kong Female Writing into English: Wong Bik-wan’s Language of the ‘Repressed’.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, 1 (2017): 206-31.
[Abstract: If a domesticated translation from Chinese to English can be understood as an act of eurocentrism, then the difficulties in translating Wong Bik‐wan’s latest novel Weixi chong xing (The re‐walking of Mei‐hei, 2014) reveal how this Hong Kong female writer uses language to escape patriarchal and colonial influences. This article examines how Wong makes use of the strategy of writing as a “repressed” individual (both in terms of her subject position and language style). Even though her language and sentences are at times short and dense, and the rhythm is fast, Wong demonstrates how one can reveal more by seemingly saying less. Attempts to reduce her text to a single interpretation have only resulted in failure. If it is hard for the repressed to speak without oppression, Wong illustrates how one can circumvent the constraints through the tactic of evasion, and demonstrates how the repressed can explode from gaps and silence.]
Hung, Eva. “Translation and English in 20th-century China.” World Englishes 21, 2 (2002): 325-35.
—–. “Cultural Borderlands in China’s Translation History.” In Eva Hung, ed. Translation and Cultural Change: Studies in History, Norms and Image-Projection. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005, 43-64.
Hung, Eva, ed. Translation and Cultural Change: Studies in History, Norms and Image-Projection. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005.
Janku, Andrea. “Translating Genre: How the ‘Leading Article’ Became the Shelun.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 329-54.
Jasper, David, Geng Youzhuang, and Wang Hai, eds. A Poetics of Translation: Between Chinese and English Literature. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016. [MCLC Resource Center review by Joshua Fogel]
Kaminski, Johannes Daniel. “Punctuation, Exclamation and Tears: The Sorrows of Young Werther in Japanese and Chinese Translation (1990-1922).” Comparative Critical Studies 14, 1 (2017): 29-48.
[Abstract: Rich in exclamations and ellipses, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther inhabits a linguistic space in German that does not immediately lend itself to literal translation. Its first translations into Japanese and Chinese coincided with periods of linguistic innovation, as writers and translators contributed to the development of vernacular writing. While in Japanese versions the rendered text faithfully evinces intermediate stages of vernacularization, Guo Moruo’s 1922 translation represents a radical attempt to reshape language. By finding literal equivalents of Goethe’s stylistic idiosyncrasies, Guo actively shapes the Chinese vernacular, i.e. he establishes the syntactical usage of an exclamation particle plus an exclamation mark. Since German and Chinese belong to different language families, his translation artificially creates intralingual affinities.]
Klein, Lucas. “Strong and Weak Interpretations in Translation Chinese Poetry.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, 2/15, 1 (Winter 2017/Summer 2018): 7-43.
[Abstract: Are classical Chinese and modern Chinese one language, or two? Is translating classical Chinese poetry the same as or different from translating modern Chinese poetry? I have earlier argued that modern Chinese poetry is in some ways a translation of premodern Chinese poetics through the filter of international poetics—but if this is the case, then should translation of classical and modern poetry into English be more similar than they are? Looking at Lydia Liu’s notion of the “supersign” alongside my experiences translating contemporary poets Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan as well as Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, I discuss what I call “weak interpretations” and “strong interpretations” and how they play out in the translational alignment of classical and modern Chinese poetry with poetry in English today.
—–. The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness. Leiden: Brill, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Benjamin Ridgway]
—–. “Born Translated? On the Opposition Between ‘Chineseness’ and Modern Chinese Literature Written for and from Translation.” In Bruno, Cosima, Lucas Klein, and Chris Song, eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, 423-35.
Kowallis von, Jon Eugene. “On Translating Lu Xun’s Fiction.” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 11, 2 (2012): 193-213.
Knight, Sabina and Kidder Smith. “A Tautology or Two While We Translate Chinese Classics.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 1/2 (2022): 117-29.
[Abstract: What is a Chinese classic, and why do we translate one? These innocent questions lead Sabina Knight and Kidder Smith into a mandala of paradox, metaphor, and tautologies. En route they must negotiate a field of errant nouns, shifty images, and undisclosed participants. Relying on maps drawn by Borges, A. A. Milne, Quine, and Zeno, they find themselves in a landscape where little is certain and much is in transit—from here to here. The generic passports of poetry, prose, and philosophy have been stamped Invalid. So everyone acts like a resident alien. The authors discover that what they don’t know is as useful as what they do. And, strangely, translations materialize.]
Kreissler, Francoise. “China-Europe: Transcontinental ‘Intellectual Cooperation during the Interwar Period.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 15-27.
Kubin, Wolfgang. “To Translate Is to Ferry Across: Wu Li’s (1632-1718) Collection from Sao Paolo.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 579-88.
Kung, Sze-wen. Translation of Contemporary Taiwan Literature in a Cross-Cultural Context: A Translation Studies Perspective. Routledge, 2021.
[Abstract: explores the social, cultural, and linguistic implications of translation of Taiwan literature for transnational cultural exchange. It demonstrates principally how asymmetrical cultural relationships, mediation processes, and ideologies of the translation players constitute the culture-specific translation activity as a highly contested site, where translation can reconstruct and rewrite the literature and the culture it represents. Four main theoretical themes are explored in relation to such translation activity: sociological studies, cultural and rewriting studies, English as a lingua franca, and social and performative linguistics. These offer insightful perspectives on the translation as an interpretive encounter between not only two languages, two cultural systems and assumptions taking place, but also among various translation mediators.]
Kurtz, Joachim. “Matching Names and Actualities: Translation and the Discovery of Chinese Logic.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 471-506.
—–. The Discovery of Chinese Logic. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
[Abstract: Until 1898, Chinese and foreign scholars agreed that China had never known, needed, or desired a field of study similar in scope and purpose to European logic. Less than a decade later, Chinese literati claimed that the discipline had been part of the empire’s learned heritage for more than two millennia. This book analyzes the conceptual, ideological, and institutional transformations that made this drastic change of opinion possible and acceptable. Reconstructing the discovery of Chinese logic as a paradigmatic case of the epistemic shifts that continue to shape interpretations of China’s intellectual history, it offers a fresh view of the formation of modern academic discourses in East Asia and adds a neglected chapter to the global histories of science and philosophy]
Kwan, Uganda Sze Pui. “Rejuvenating China: The Translation of Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s Juvenile Literature by Lin Shu in Late Imperial China.” Translation Studies 6, 1 (2013): 33-47.
[Abstract: Lin Shu (1852–1924) translated Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s works in late Qing China (1644–1912) with a political purpose in mind. By contextualizing the translation background, analyzing the discourse created by Lin Shu at the para- translation level in his translations of Haggard’s works and highlighting Lin’s treatment of gender, this study argues that Lin Shu appropriated Haggard’s work to refresh the national imagination of China by means of a new allegory – the juvenile boy. Lin Shu adopted a gender-inclusive Chinese term, shaonian, to denote the notion “juvenile”, following Liang Qichao (1873–1929), who was influenced by the impact of translated juvenile literature on the successful transformation of Meiji Japan (1868–1912) into a powerful modern state. Through his use of an ostensibly gender-neutral term in reference only to the young male protagonist, Lin Shu exploits and extends Haggard’s colonialist politics into a discourse whose intention is to mobilize male Chinese readers to rejuvenate China.]
—–. “1873, June 19: The Politics of Translation and the Romanization of Chnese into a World Language.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 119-25.
Kwan, Uganda Sze-pui and Lawrence Wang-chi Wong, eds. Translation and Global Asia. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2014.
[Abstract: The present volume originates from ‘The Fourth Asian Translation Traditions Conference’ held in Hong Kong in December 2010. The conference generated stimulating discussions relating to the richness and diversity of non-Western discourses and practices of translation, focusing on translational exchanges between non-Western languages, and the change and continuity in Asian translation traditions. Translation and Global Asia shows a rich diversification of historical and geographical interests, and covers a broad array of topics, ranging from ninth-century Buddhist translation in Tibet to twenty-first-century political translation in Malaysia.]
Lackner, Michael, Iwo Amelung, and Joachim Kurtz, eds. New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge and Lexical China in Late Imperial China. Leiden: Brill, 2001.
Lackner, Michael and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds. Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Lai, Sharon Tzu-yun. “Erasing the Translators: A History of Pirated Translation in Taiwan, 1949-1987.” In Nano Sato-Rossberg and Akiko Uchiyama, eds., Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019, 29-49.
[Abstract: In the period of Taiwan’s martial law (1949–1987), it was illegal to publish transla- tions penned by translators living in Communist China. Fifty years of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) had only recently come to an end; the local population lacked familiarity with Modern Chinese, the new official language. As a result, few local translators were versed in Chinese; thus, many of the translations circulating in Taiwan came via Hong Kong, pirated from versions published in China. In total, some 600 translated titles from China were pirated in Taiwan with the names of at least 380 translators being erased. This paper aims to describe the political and linguistic reasons for this large-scale, decades-long piratic practice in translation, as well as the consequences thereof.]
Lai-Henderson, Selina. Mark Twain in China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
[Abstract: Mark Twain (1835–1910) has had an intriguing relationship with China that is not as widely known as it should be. Although he never visited the country, he played a significant role in speaking for the Chinese people both at home and abroad. After his death, his Chinese adventures did not come to an end, for his body of works continued to travel through China in translation throughout the twentieth century. Were Twain alive today, he would be elated to know that he is widely studied and admired there, and that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn alone has gone through no less than ninety different Chinese translations, traversing China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Looking at Twain in various Chinese contexts—his response to events involving the American Chinese community and to the Chinese across the Pacific, his posthumous journey through translation, and China’s reception of the author and his work, Mark Twain in China points to the repercussions of Twain in a global theater. It highlights the cultural specificity of concepts such as “race,” “nation,” and “empire,” and helps us rethink their alternative legacies in countries with dramatically different racial and cultural dynamics from the United States.
Laughlin, Charles. “The New Translators and Contemporary Chinese Literature in English: A Review of the Journals Chinese Literature Today, Pathlight, and Chutzpah!/Peregrine.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews 35 (2013): 209-14.
Lee, Christopher. “Translation in Distraction: On Eileen Chang’s ‘Chinese Translation’, a Vehicle of Cultural Influence.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, 1 (Summer 2017): 65-87.
[Abstract: This essay focuses on a previously obscure and only recently republished English text held at USC that offers an unparalleled window into Chang’s engagement with translation. The untitled manuscript, typed with handwritten additions and corrections, is contained in a folder marked “Untitled article or speech” and appears to be the script of an oral presentation in which Chang surveys the development of translation in China from the late-Qing period, through the 1911 revolution, the May Fourth period, the war with Japan, the 1949 revolution and the Cultural Revolution. Her speech emphasizes how translation functioned as an index to China’s fraught relationship with the outside world, particularly the West (including Japan and Russia); to that end, the text engages with historical movements such as imperialism, modernization, and the ideological polarization of the Cold War, resulting in an account that belies her reputation as an apolitical figure. While the rediscovery of a text by Eileen Chang is certainly a matter of anecdotal interest, the purpose of this essay is not only to reconstruct its history but also to consider how it illuminates her lifelong relationship to translation through which, I will argue, she tried to unsettle the geopolitical categories that Chih-ming Wang 王智明 (2012) has identified as foundational to modern Chinese literary culture. In what follows, I start by providing an overview of the text based on archival and other sources and provide a summary of its contents. Turning to Shuang Shen’s 沈雙 (2012) discussion of translation as impersonation, I consider how the oral address, a rare textual form in the oeuvre of a notoriously reclusive writer, involves navigating the roles of reader, author, and translator. Through this genre, Chang hints at the possibility of distancing herself from the geopolitics of translation even as the ultimate failure to do so reveals the constraints of her diasporic condition.]
Lee, Klaudia Hui Yen. Charles Dickens and China, 1895-1915: Cross-Cultural Encounters. New York: Routledge, 2017.
[Abstract: From 1895 to 1915, Chinese translations of Dickens’s fiction first appeared as part of a growing interest in Western literature and culture among Chinese intellectuals. Klaudia Hiu Yen investigates the multifarious ways in which Dickens’s works were adapted, reconfigured, and transformed for the Chinese readership against the turbulent political and social conditions in the last stages of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) and the early Republic (1912-1949). Moving beyond the ‘Response to the West’ model which often characterises East-West interactions, Lee explores how Chinese intellectuals viewed Dickens’s novels as performing a particular social function; on occasion, they were used to advance the country’s social and political causes. Translation and adaptation became a means through which the politics and social values of the original Dickens texts were undermined or even subverted. Situating the early introduction of Dickens to China within the broader field of Victorian studies, Lee challenges some of the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the ’global’ turn, both in Dickens scholarship and in Victorian studies in general.]
Lee, Tong King. “China as Dystopia: Cultural Imaginings through Translation.” Translation Studies 8, 3 (2015): 251-68.
[Abstract: This article explores how China is represented in English translations of contemporary Chinese literature. It seeks to uncover the discourses at work in framing this literature for reception by an anglophone readership, and to suggest how these discourses dovetail with meta-narratives on China circulating in the West. In addition to asking what gets translated, the article is interested in how Chinese authors and their works are positioned, marketed and commodified in the West through the discursive material that surrounds a translated book. Drawing on English translations of works by Yan Lianke, Ma Jian, Chan Koonchung, Yu Hua, Su Tong and Mo Yan, the article argues that literary translation is part of a wider programme of anglophone textual practices that renders China an overdetermined sign pointing to a repressive, dystopic Other. The knowledge structures governing these textual practices circumscribe the ways in which China is imagined and articulated, thereby producing a discursive China.]
Leonesi, Barbara. “What to Translate? How a Literary Translator Can Support or Oppose the Official Discourse.” In Nicoletta Pesaro, ed.. The Ways of Translation: Constraints and Liberties of Translating Chinese. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2013, 148-160. [deals with some prominent Chinese literary translators in the PRC]
Li, Jin and Sean MacDonald. “Three Late Qing Translations of Robinson Crusoe: Shen Zufen, Dalu bao, and Lin Shu.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 38 (2016): 79-106.
[Abstract: William Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of the most translated works of Western literature in the history of translation in China. It was read by many in China as a figure of Western culture that had suddenly risen to prominence on the world stage. This paper discusses three important translations from the first decade of the twentieth century, the Shen Zufen translation, which refigures Crusoe within Reform Movement discourse, the Dalu bao translation that reimagined Crusoe as Revolutionary Outlaws of the Marsh type of popular hero, and the Lin Shu/Zeng Zonggong translation, which reframed Crusoe within Confucian discourse. These early twentieth-century translations serve as profound case studies for the entwinement and tension of global universals and national position-takings occurring in our present historic moment.
Li, Shuangyi. “Proust and China: Translation, Ideology and Contemporary Intertextual Practics.” Comparative Critical Studies 11, 2/3 (2014): 295-314.
—–. Travel, Translation and Transmedia Aesthetics: Franco-Chinese Literature and Visual Arts in a Global Age. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Robert Moore]
Li, Zheng-shuan. “A Survey of Translation of Robert Burns’ ‘A Red, Red Rose’ in China.” Journal of Literature and Art Studies 6, 4 (2016): 325-39.
Lin, Wusun. “Translation in Transition: Variables and Invariables.” In Eva Hung, ed. Translation and Cultural Change: Studies in History, Norms and Image-Projection. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005, 175-82.
Lingenfelter, Andrea. “Where You End and I Begin: Notes on Subjectivity and Ethics in the Translation of Poetry.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, 2/15, 1 (Winter 2017/Summer 2018): 73-105.
[Abstract: What can translation teach us about poetry and poetics? To what extent is a lyric constellation portable, and to what extent is it embedded in a particular culture or language? How much of a foreign syntax can be replicated before things break down? What is the role of sound in a translation? By discussing poems by three poets whose work I have translated—the Taiwanese poet Yang Mu and the mainland-Chinese poets Zhai Yongming and Wang Yin—this paper explores issues such as the above. It connects these issues with the question of “where you end and I begin” and vice versa, which takes on added significance if the translator writes poetry of their own.]
Liu, Celie. “Sidney Shapiro’s Translatorial Agency: A Diachronic Perspective.” International Journal of Translation, Interpretation, and Applied Linguistics 1, 1 (2019).
Liu, Honghua. “Sidney Shapiro’s Translational Agency: A Diachronic Perspective.” International Journal of Translation, Interpretation, and Applied Linguistics 1, 1 (2019): 55-65.
[Abstract: Translatorial agencies have gained wider currency in contemporary translation studies. Efforts havebeen made to delve into it from both translators’ individual habits and the contextual elements of theirwork. But there is still relatively little work done on the variety of translatorial agencies exercised indifferent actual working conditions. Drawing on available studies and archival primary sources, thisarticle tries to look into the development of translatorial agencies over time and space by uncoveringthe translator Sidney Shapiro’s changeable textual, paratextual and extratextual agency in differenttranslation networks in which he had been involved. The central argument of the article is that theextent to which translatorial agencies are influenced by other actors in the same network depends onwhether the translator has the chance, ability, and willingness to negotiate with them.]
Liu, Jane Qian. Transcultural Lyricism: Translation, Intertextuality, and the Rise of Emotion in Modern Chinese Love Fiction, 1899-1925. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
[Abstract: Liu examines the profound transformation of emotional expression in Chinese fiction between the years 1899 and 1925. While modern Chinese literature is known to have absorbed narrative modes of Western literatures, it also learned radically new ways to convey emotions. Drawn from an interdisciplinary mixture of literary, cultural and translation studies, Liu brings fresh insights into the study of intercultural literary interpretation and influence. She convincingly proves that Chinese writer-translators in early twentieth century were able to find new channels and modes to express emotional content through new combinations of traditional Chinese and Western techniques.]
—–. “Creating Melodramatic Emotional Effects: Zhou Shoujuan’s Creative Translations of Short Stories on Love.” In Liu, Transcultural Lyricism: Translation, Intertextuality, and the Rise of Emotion in Modern Chinese Love Fiction, 1899-1925. Leiden: Brill, 2017, 78-118.
—–. “Pseudotranslation, intertextuality and metafictionality: three case studies of pseudotranslation from early twentieth-century China.” Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 27, 3 (2019): 389-403.
[Abstract: The turn of the twentieth century saw a growing number of works of pseudotranslation in China. Pseudotranslation engages with authentic translation on three levels: textual, generic and discursive. It engages with authentic translations on the textual level because sometimes authors of pseudotranslation borrow various semantic units, such as words, phrases or passages, from authentic translations to construct their own disguised works. More importantly, pseudotranslation can be considered to be referring intertextually to the genre of translation, where genre is conceived as the specific norms and stylistic characteristics of literary translation. Pseudotranslation may also refer to specific discourses, that is, it makes use of certain discourses embodied in and represented by translations, as well as the source texts they represent. These three levels of intertextual engagement foreground the metafictional nature of pseudotranslation, that is, the way it reflects on and refracts authentic translations and domestic cultural and literary traditions. Three case studies of pseudotranslation in China at the beginning of the twentieth century are provided to illustrate and explore the three levels of intertextual engagement.]
Liu, Jinyu. “Virgil in China in the Twentieth Century.” Sino-American Journal of Comparative Literature I (2015): 67-105.
—–. “Translating and Rewriting Western Classics in China (1920s-1930s): The Case of the Xueheng Journal.” In Almut-Barbara Renger and Xin Fan, eds., Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 91-111.
Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity, 1900-1937. Stanford: SUP, 1995.
Liu, Lydia, ed. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Lockard, Joe and Qin Dan. “Translation Ideologies of American Literature in China.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 11, 2 (2016): 269-86.
[Abstract: Chinese translations of U.S. literature manifest a shift from the third-world inter- nationalism and anti-Western and anti-capitalist politics of the 1950s toward a diminished rhetorical antagonism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Because translation introductions are instrumental in introducing Chinese readers to the social context of U.S. literature, we surveyed a broad sam- ple of prefaces. Based on this survey, we theorize China-U.S. translation relations within a world system; examine the ideological character of post-Revolution translation introductions to American literature; and identify shifting ideological tides following the Cultural Revolution.]
Lundberg, Lennart. Lu Xun as a Translator: Lu Xun’s Translation and Introduction of Literature and Literary Theory, 1903-1936. Stockholm: Orientaliska Studier, Stockholm University, 1989.
Lung, Rachel. “The Oral Translator’s ‘Visibility’: The Chinese Translation of David Copperfield by Lin Shu and Wei Yi.” TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 17, 2 (2004): 161-184.
Luo, Hui. “Line, Loop, Constellation: Classical Chinese Poetry Between Sinophone and Anglophone Worlds.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 62-73.
Ma, Jun. “A Brief Study on the Translation of Western Military Ranks in Late Qing.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 143-71.
Ma, Yuanyi and Bo Wang. Translating Tagore’s Stray Birds into Chinese: Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics to Chinese Poetry Translation. NY: Routledge, 2020.
[Abstract: explores the choices in poetry translation in light of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and illustrates the ways in which readers can achieve a deeper understanding of translated works in English and Chinese. Focusing on Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’, a collection of elegant and philosophical poems, as a source text, Ma and Wang analyse four Chinese target texts by Zheng Zhenduo, Yao Hua, Lu Jinde and Feng Tang and consider their linguistic complexities through SFL. This book analyses the source text and the target texts from the perspectives of the four strata of language, including graphology, phonology, lexicogrammar and context. Ideal for researchers and academics of SFL, Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis, Translating Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’ into Chinese provides an in-depth exploration of SFL and its emerging prominence in the field of Translation Studies.]
Magagnin, Paolo. “Some Implications of the Practice of the Remainder for the Translation of Modern Chinese Literature.” In Nicoletta Pesaro, ed., The Ways of Translation. Constraints and Liberties of Translating Chinese. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2013, 27-41. [deals with Yu Dafu]
—–. “Domestication, Exoticization, and Rewriting: Jing Yinyu, Translator of Yu Dafu.” In Nicoletta Pesaro, ed., The Ways of Translation. Constraints and Liberties of Translating Chinese. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2013, 131-147.
Mangalagiri, Adhira. States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relations in the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.
[Abstract: States of Disconnect examines the breakdown of transnationalism through readings of literary texts that express aversion to pairing ideas of China and India. Adhira Mangalagiri proposes the concept of “disconnect”: a crisis of transnationalism perceptible when a connection is severed, interrupted, or disavowed. Despite their apparent insularity, texts of disconnect offer possibilities for relating ethically across borders while resisting both narrow nationalisms and globalized habits of thought.]
Marin-Lacarta, Maialen. “A Brief History of Translations of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature in Spain, 1949-2009.” 1611: A Journal of Translation History (Dec. 2012).
McDougall, Bonnie S. Translation Zones in Modern China: Authoritarian Command versus Gift Exchange. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011. [MCLC Resource Center review by Douglas Robinson]
—–. “World Literature, Global Culture and Contemporary Chinese Literature in Translation.” International Communication of Chinese Culture 1, 1-2 (2014): 47-64.
—–. “Writing Translation (Stories).” Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature, 1, 1 (2022): 4–25.
Messner, Angelika. “On ‘Translating’ Western Psychiatry into the Chinese Context in Republican China.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 639-58.
Nappi, Carla. Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Lucas Klein]
Ng, Kenny K. K. “Ending as Beginning: Chinese. Translations of Edward Bellamy’s Utopian Novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10, 1 (2016): 9-35.
[Abstract: The Chinese translation of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1887) at the turn of the twentieth century has been little studied, in spite of Bellamy’s obvious influence on Chinese intellectuals and reformist thinkers. Enthusiastically embraced by the intelligentsia as a gospel of social change, the utopian fiction has inspired subsequent Chinese writings of science fantasy in popular fiction. Bellamy’s tale centers on the adventure of time-traveler Julian West, a young Bostonian who is put into a hypnotic sleep in the late nineteenth century and awakens in the year 2000 in a socialist utopia. He discovers an ideally realized vision of the future, one unthinkable in his own century. This article argues that Chinese translators, in their conventional form of storytelling, have intentionally converted Bellamy’s original religious prophesy into a vision of a new and modernized state that is in line with the Chinese evolutionary historical imagination. It discusses the problematic of imagining the future by delineating the relationships of utopianism, social modernity, and temporality as the novel was written by an engaged American writer and then rendered into various Chinese versions by Western missionaries, Chinese intellectuals, and popular writers.]
O’Connell, George and Diana Shi. “Half-Heard Voices of the Primal Zone: Sleep and Waking in a Poem by Cao Shuying.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14,2/15,1 (Winter 2017/Summer 2018): 129-45.
[Abstract: Initially touching artifacts and sculpture from ancient Greece, and the risk of misreading thought or emotion cross-culturally, this essay draws briefly on Wordsworth’s testimony that poetic process arises first in a primally sensual and pre-verbal zone. The essay then proposes that similar practice, carried by craft and poetic experience in the target language, may be equally advantageous in poetry translation, while helping bridge individual and cross-cultural differences. In light of this, the essay’s second half addresses translational details in rendering Cao Shuying’s poem “I Often Read, Early Mornings.”]
Passi, Federica. “Translation, Modernity and the Past: the Case of Zhang Ailing.” In Nicoletta Pesaro, ed., The Ways of Translation. Constraints and Liberties of Translating Chinese. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2013, 74-86.
Peng, Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
[Abstract: The authors investigate the significant role translation plays in cultural mediation. Transnational organizations that bring about cross-cultural interactions as well as regulating authorities, in the form of both nation-states and ideologies, are under scrutiny.]
Pesaro, Nicoletta. “Authorship, Ideology, and Translation: the Case of Ma Jian.” In Pesaro, ed., The Ways of Translation: Constraints and Liberties of Translating Chinese. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2013, 161-174.
Pesaro, Nicoletta, ed. The Ways of Translation: Constraints and Liberties of Translating Chinese. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2013.
Pfister, Lauren. “Nineteenth Century Ruist Metaphysical Terminology and the Sino-Scottish Connection in James Legge’s Chinese Classics.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 615-39.
Pino, Angel. “Ba Jin as a Translator.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 28-105.
Pollard, David, ed. Translation and Creation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998.
Prado-Fonts, Carles. Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He argues that Orientalism became an instrument of hegemony not only between “the West and the rest” but also within the West itself, where Spanish writers used representations of China to connect themselves to Europe, hone a national voice, or forward ideas of political and cultural modernity. Uncovering an eclectic and surprising archive, Prado-Fonts draws on diverse cultural artifacts from popular literature, journalism, and early cinema to offer a rich account of how China was seen across the West between 1880 and 1930. Enrique Gaspar, Luis de Oteyza, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and lesser-known authors writing in Spanish and Catalan put themselves in dialogue with Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, W. Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Pearl Buck, and André Malraux, as well as stereotypical figures from popular culture like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Throughout, Prado-Fonts exposes translation as a technology of cultural hegemony and China as an appealing object for representation. A timely contribution to our understanding of how we create and consume knowledge about the world, Secondhand China is essential reading for scholars and students of Orientalism, postcolonial studies, translation studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies.]
Qi, Shouhua. Western Literature in China and the Translation of a Nation. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
[Abstract: This book studies the reception history of Western literature in China from the 1840s to the present. Qi explores the socio-historical contexts and the contours of how Western literature was introduced, mostly through translation and assesses its transformative impact in the cultural, literary as well as sociopolitical life of modern China.]
Rabut, Isabelle. “Chinese Romanticism: The Acculturation of a Western Notion.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 201-23.
Sato-Rossberg, Nano and Akiko Uchiyama, eds., Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019.
Saussy, Haun. The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: Debates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique. But literature is a universe with many centers, and one of them is China. The Making of Barbarians offers an account of world literature in which China, as center, produces its own margins. Here Sinologist and comparatist Haun Saussy investigates the meanings of literary translation, adaptation, and appropriation on the boundaries of China long before it came into sustained contact with the West. When scholars talk about comparative literature in Asia, they tend to focus on translation between European languages and Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, as practiced since about 1900. In contrast, Saussy focuses on the period before 1850, when the translation of foreign works into Chinese was rare because Chinese literary tradition overshadowed those around it.]
Shan, Te-hsing. “Eileen Chang as a Chinese Translator of American Literature.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 106-25.
[Abstract: This chapter characterizes and evaluates Chang’s role as a Chinese translator of American literature. Chang’s position in modern Chinese literary history has been established ever since C.T. Hsia devoted a whole chapter to her in his ground-breaking and monumental History of Modern Chinese Fiction in 1962. However, in comparison with the strong interest in Chang the creative writer, little attention has been paid to her as a translator. In fact, a glimpse at the breakdown of the works she translated shows that her role as a translator is not only significant, but also rather complicated. Although the main mission of the USIS in Hong Kong was to carry out the diplomatic and cultural policy of the U.S. government in its global strategic deployment to contain Communism, the translation series of World Today Press had an enormous influence which went far beyond the immediate political concerns and historical milieu.]
Shei, Chris and Zhao-Ming Gao, ed. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Translation. London: Routledge, 2018.
[Abstract: presents expert and new research in analysing and solving translation problems centred on the Chinese language in translation. The Handbook includes both a review of and a distinctive approach to key themes in Chinese translation, such as translatability and equivalence, extraction of collocation, and translation from parallel and comparable corpora. In doing so, it undertakes to synthesise existing knowledge in Chinese translation, develops new frameworks for analysing Chinese translation problems, and explains translation theory appropriate to the Chinese context. It is an essential reference work for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars actively researching in this area.]
Song, Chris. “The Transcultural of American Poetry in China, 1917-1937.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14,2/15,1 (Winter 2017/Summer 2018): 187-211.
[Abstract: This paper offers a critical overview of the reception of American poetry in China from 1917 to 1937. Drawing on Maria Tymoczko’s theory of transculturation, it shows how in order to meet local poetic and ideological demands, America’s New Poetry Movement, Left poetry, and Black poetry were “performed” in (relay) translations by Chinese authors. Understudied to date, these texts reveal a fascinating literary and political process in which American poetry and Chinese poetry were mutually shaped through translation.]
—–. “Failures of Diplomatic Intents in Poetry Translation: On Thomas Francis Wade’s Chinese Translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘A Psalm of Life.'” Prism 20, 1 (2023): 77-96.
[Abstract: This article provides a fresh reading of British diplomat Thomas Francis Wade’s translation and Qing foreign-affairs official Dong Xun’s rewrite of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life.” Situating its analyses in the context of Sino-Western diplomatic maneuvers in 1860s Qing China, the article clarifies the paratextual chronology of the translations, analyzes the translators’ manipulations of poetic form, and draws on Lawrence Venuti’s theorization of foreignizing translation and Lydia H. Liu’s concept of the supersign to expose Wade’s foreignizing strategy against the Sinocentric yi 夷 (barbarity) discourse. The article’s coda investigates the circulation of this intercultural occurrence through Goethe’s Weltliteratur and David Damrosch’s renewed concept of world literature, highlighting the failures of both the British Empire’s and the Qing Empire’s diplomatic intents through the translations.]
Stalling, Jonathan. “A Decade Apart: Bridging the US and China Literary Systems, 2010-2021.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 74-84.
Sun, Yifeng. “Transition and Transformation: With Special Reference to the Translation Practice of Eileen Chang in the 1950s Hong Kong.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 11, 1 (2013): 15-32.
Sun Yifeng and Chris Song, eds. Translating Chinese Art and Modern Literature. NY: Routledge, 2019.
[Abstract: examines issues in cross-cultural dialogue in connection with translation and modern Chinese art and literature from interdisciplinary perspectives. This comprises the text-image dialogue in the context of Chinese modernity, and cross-cultural interaction between modern literature in Chinese and other literatures. This edited collection approaches these issues with discrete foci and approaches, and the ten chapters in this volume are to be divided into two distinct parts. The first part highlights the mutual effects between literary texts and visual images in the media of book, painting, and film, and the second part includes contributions by scholars of literary translation.]
Sun, Yifeng and Dechao Li, eds. Transcultural Poetic: Chinese Literature in English Translation. London: Routledge, 2023.
[Abstract: This book examines many facets of transcultural poetics in the English translation of Chinese literature from 12 different expert contributors. Translating Chinese literature into English is a special challenge. There is a pressing need to overcome a slew of obstacles to the understanding and appreciation of Chinese literary works by readers in the English-speaking world. Hitherto only intermittent attempts have been made to theorize and explore the exact role of the translator as a cultural and aesthetic mediator informed by cross-cultural knowledge, awareness, and sensitivity. Given the complexity of literary translation, sophisticated poetics of translation in terms of literary value and aesthetic taste needs to be developed and elaborated more fully from a cross-cultural perspective. It is, therefore, necessary to examine attempts to reconcile the desire for authentic transmission of Chinese culture with the need for cultural mediation and appropriation in terms of the production and reception of texts, subject to the multiplicity of constraints, in order to shed new light on the longstanding conundrum of Chinese-English literary translation by addressing Chinese literature in the multiple contexts of nationalism, cross-cultural hybridity, literary untranslatability, the reception of translation, and also world literature.]
Svarverud, Rune. “The Formation of a Chinese Lexicon of International Law, 1847-1903.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 537-54.
Tam, Kwok-kan. “Art and Ideology in China’s Postsocialist Stage Productions of A Doll’s House.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 45, 2 (June 2018): 222-42.
Tong, Clement. “Foreignized Translation and the Case against ‘Chinese Vernacular Fiction.'” mTm 6 (2014).
Tsau, Shu-ying. “‘They Learn in Suffering What They Teach in Song’: Lu Xun and Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Symbols of Anguish.” In Wolfgang Kubin, ed., Symbols of Anguish: In Search of Melancholy in China. Bern: Peter Lang, 2001, 507-36.
van Crevel, Maghiel. “The Cultural Translation of Battlers Poetry (Dagong shige).” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14,2/15,1 (Winter 2017/Summer 2018): 129-45.
[Abstract: Contemporary mainland-Chinese poetry displays a great deal of diversity and dynamism. Battlers poetry (dagong shige)—writing by members of the underclass of domestic migrant workers—is a relatively recent arrival. This essay delves into the discourse surrounding battlers poetry and its interactions with other poetry “departments,” particularly that of avant-garde poetry. It does so from the perspective of cultural translation. I argue that this is especially helpful for understanding the dynamics of battlers poetry, and of “poetry” at large as a discursive space in China today. The essay offers a discussion of translated people, texts in transit, commentary as conflict and battlers poetry’s representation outside China. In closing, it asks how this poetry might affect the genre’s habitual conceptualizations.]
—–. “China’s Battler Poetry and the Hypertranslatability of Zheng Xiaoqiong.” Web lecture, February 3, 2022. University of Chicago.
—–, ed. “Chinese Poetry and Translation: Moving the Goal Posts,” special issue of Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, 2/15, 1 (Winter 2017-Summer 2018).
van Crevel, Maghiel and Lucas Klein, eds. Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs. Amsterstam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019.
[TOC: Introduction: The Weird Third Thing, by Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein (1) Sitting with Discomfort: A Queer-Feminist Approach to Translating Yu Xiuhua, by Jenn Marie Nunes; (2) Working with Words: Poetry, Translation, and Labor, by Eleanor Goodman; (3) Translating Great Distances: The Case of the Shijing, by Joseph R. Allen; (4) Purpose and Form: On the Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry, by Wilt L. Idema; (5) Embodiment in the Translation of Chinese Poetry, by Nick Admussen; (6) Translating Theory: Bei Dao, Pasternak, and Russian Formalism, by Jacob Edmond; (7) Narrativity in Lyric Translation: English Translations of Chinese Ci Poetry, by Zhou Min; (8) Sublimating Sorrow: How to Embrace Contradiction in Translating the “Li Sao,” by Nicholas Morrow Williams; (9) Mediation Is Our Authenticity: Dagong Poetry and the Shijing in Translation, by Lucas Klein; (10) Ecofeminism avant la lettre: Chen Jingrong and Baudelaire, by Liansu Meng; (11) Ronald Mar and the Trope of Life: The Translation of Western Modernist Poetry in Hong Kong, by Chris Song; (12) Ya Xian’s Lyrical Montage: Modernist Poetry in Taiwan through the Lens of Translation, by Tara Coleman; (13) Celan’s “Deathfugue” in Chinese: A Polemic about Translation and Everything Else, by Joanna Krenz; (14) Trauma in Translation: Liao Yiwu’s “Massacre” in English and German, Rui Kunze; (15) A Noble Art, and a Tricky Business: Translation Anthologies of Chinese Poetry, by Maghiel van Crevel]
Veg, Sebastian. “Lu Xun and ‘Hard Translations’: The Specificities of Republican Literature.” In Nicoletta Pesaro, ed., The Ways of Translation: Constraints and Liberties of Translating Chinese. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2013, 45-59.
Volland, Nicolai. “The Birth of a Profession: Translators and Translation in Modern China.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 126-49.
Wakabayashi, Judy. “The Reconceptualization of Translation from Chinese in 18th-century Japan.” In Eva Hung, ed. Translation and Cultural Change: Studies in History, Norms and Image-Projection. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005, 119-46.
Wang, Baorong. Lu Xun’s Fiction in English Translation: The Early Years. Ph.D. diss. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong, 2011.
—–. “Translation Practices and the Issue of Directionality in China.” Meta: journal des traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal 56, 4 (2011): 896-914.
—–. “George Kin Leung’s English Translation of Lu Xun’s A Q Zhengzhuan.” Archive Orientalni 85 (2017): 253-81.
Wang, Bo and Ma Yuanyi. Lao She’s Teahouse and Its Two English Translations: Exploring Chinese Drama Translation with Systemic Functional Linguisitcs. London and New York: Routledge, 2020.
[Abstract: provides an in-depth application of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to the study of Chinese drama translation, and theoretically explores the interface between SFL and drama translation. Investigating two English translations of the Chinese drama, Teahouse (茶馆 Cha Guan in Chinese) by Lao She, and translated by John Howard-Gibbon and Ying Ruocheng respectively, Bo Wang and Yuanyi Ma apply Systemic Functional Linguistics to point out the choices that translators have to make in translation.]
Wang, Jie and Josh Stenberg. “Soft Power from Ningxia to Cairo: Chinese-to-Arabic Translation of Modern and Contemporary Literature.” Translation Studies (2018): 1–17.
Wang, Kan. “North America, English Translation, and Contemporary Chinese Literature.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 4 (2012): 570-81.
[Abstract: Although contemporary Chinese writers attach great importance to the translation of their works and their introduction into the English-speaking world, especially North America, their efforts are rarely able to improve the international status of Chinese literature. There are various obstacles and prejudices faced by Chinese writers that can be roughly divided into three categories: institutional language filters, selective translation based on “Cold War logic,” and self-proclaimed literary evaluation criteria by the English speaking critics. These factors interact to influence the dissemination of contemporary Chinese literature in English-speaking world, especially North America.]
Wang, Shengyu. “Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales.” Comparative Literature 73, 4 (Dec. 2021): 442-462.
Wong, Lawrence Wang-chi. “Beyond Xin Da Ya: Translation Problems in the Late Qing.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 239-64.
Wong, Lawrence Wang-chi, ed. Towards a History of Translating: In Commemoration of the 40th Anniversary of the Research Centre for Translation, CUHK Volume I: On Translation. HK: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2013.
—–. Towards a History of Translating: In Commemoration of the 40th Anniversary of the Research Centre for Translation, CUHK Volume II: On Chinese Literature. HK: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2013.
—–. Towards a History of Translating: In Commemoration of the 40th Anniversary of the Research Centre for Translation, CUHK Volume III: On Translation History. HK: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2013.
—–. Translation and Modernization in East Asia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Hong Kong: Research Centre for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2017.
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p style=”padding-left: 60px;”>[Contents]: The Meiji Government’s Strategic Deployment of Non-Fiction Translation as a Vehicle of Modernization, Judy Wakabayashi; Translated Modernity and Gender Politics in Colonial Korea, Hyaeweol Choi; Rejuvenating the Nation: Translation, Nationalism, and the Establishment of Children’s Literature in Korea in the Early Twentieth Century, Theresa Hyun; The Project of the Modernization of Chinese Historiography: Translation, Diffusion, and Convergence, Hans Kuhner; Translating Authority: In Search of Commensurability between Tianxia World Order and Western Sovereignty, Maria Adele Carrai; ‘Entrance into the Family of Nations’: Translation and the First Diplomatic Missions to the West, 1860s–1870s, Lawrence Wang-chi Wong; Civilization in Transformation: Liang Qichao’s Theory and Practice of Translation, 1890s–1920s, Satoru Hashimoto; The First Translations of the Italian Literary Avant-Garde Movement in the Chinese Press at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, Alessandra Brezzi; World of Fiction, Fiction of the World: The Butterfly Translation of Modernity in Story World Magazine, John Christopher Hamm; Negotiating Chinese Modernity through the Translation of Tears: Two ‘Foreign’ Tragic Love Stories from Early Twentieth-Century China, Yun Zhu; From ‘Geschäftiger Geist’ to ‘Zeitgeist’: On Guo Moruo’s Translation of Goethe’s Faust, Pu Wang]
Wong, Nicholas Y. H. “Translating Taiwan and Riding the Iron Horse of Fate in Nature: An Interview with Darryl Sterk.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 54, 1-2 (2023): 78-87.
[Abstract: On October 7, 2022, Darryl Sterk, a prolific Chinese-English literary translator, paid a virtual visit to my translation course at the University of Hong Kong. Students came ready to discuss Sterk’s translations of Wu Ming-yi’s The Stolen Bicycle (Danche shiqie ji, 2017), Sakinu Ahronglong’s Hunter School (Shanzhu feishu Sakenu, 2020), and Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town (Gui difang, 2022). I curated these three texts to consider the relationship between translation and minority issues in Taiwan from environmental, indigenous, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender angles. But my students had their own questions, which they later transcribed and edited, along with Sterk’s responses. The result is an eclectic mix of topics that deal with the technical aspects of Chinese-English translation, such as code-switching, machine translation, translation of Chinese topolects (fangyan), relay translation, romanization, and translator’s notes, as well as the cultural, historical, and even environmental aspects of Chinese-English translation.]
Wong, Timothy. “The Rendering of God in Chinese by the Chinese: Chinese Responses to the Term Question in the Wanguo gongbao.” In Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 537-54.
Wu, Chunrong and Fei Tan. “The Translator’s Subjectivity in The Golden Cangue from the Perspective of Feminism.” World Journal of English Language 7, 3 (2017).
Xu, Minhui. “On Scholar Translators in Literary Translation – A Case Study of Kinkley’s Translation of ‘Biancheng.’” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 20, 2 (2012): 151-63.
Yan, Wei. “1903, September: Sherlock Holmes Comes to China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017, 178-83.
Ye, Michelle Jia. “Expanding Translation: A Text Map of New Youth (1915–1918).” Journal of Translation Studies 2, no. 1 (2018): 59–106.
—–. “Exhibiting Knowledge, Extending Network: Translation Bricolage Columns of the Magazines of the China Book Company, 1913–1916.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 2 (Fall 2020): 277-322.
—–. “A History from Below: Translators in the Publication Network of Four Magazines Issued by the China Book Company, 1913–1923.” Translation Studies 15, no. 1(2022): 37-53.
Zhang, Longxi. “Chinese Literature, Translation, and World Literature.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 25-39.
Zhu, Ping. “The Masquerade of Male Masochists: Two Tales of Translation of the Zhou Brothers (Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren) in the 1910s.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 1 (March 2014): 31-51.
[Abstract: Through reading two creatively translated stories by the Zhou brothers, Lu Xun’s (Zhou Shuren) “The Soul of Sparta” (Sibada zhi hun, 1903) and Zhou Zuoren’s “The Chivalrous Slave Girl” (Xia nünu, 1904), this paper takes a close look at the intellectual trend in the first decade of the twentieth-century China of constructing strong and heroic women as the emblem of national power while rendering men as powerless. By focusing on a foreign heroine with traditional Chinese virtues, both translations creatively Sinicized and feminized the foreign power in the original tales. At the same time, male characters, prospective readers of the stories, and even authors themselves were marginalized, diminished, and ridiculed vis-à-vis the newly constructed feminine authority. Comparing this form of cultural masochism to other literary masochisms in modern China analyzed by Rey Chow and Jing Tsu respectively, this paper endeavors to excavate a hybrid model of nationalist agency grounded in the intertwined relationship of race, gender and nation. In my analysis, Gilles Deleuze’s discussion on masochism is utilized as a heuristic tool to shed light on the revolutionary potential embedded in the “strong women, weak men” complex in the 1910s. I argue that the cultural masochism in late Qing represents one of the earliest attempts of the Chinese intellectuals to creatively use Chinese traditional gender cosmology to absorb the threat of Western imperialism and put forward a hybrid model of nationalist agency.]
State of the Field
Admussen, Nick. “The Poetry Turn: Writing Chinese Cultural Studies between Empires.” Prism 20, 1 (2023): 177-200.
[Abstract: This article attempts to conceptualize and encourage an already extant conceptual turn right now taking place in China studies: a turn toward poetry composition, in which transcultural critical scholars also compose their own original poetry. The reason for the phenomenon, the article argues, is the interimperial position of China scholars in English, forced to study texts from one imperial culture in the contexts of another. The article reads poems by Ni Zhange, Wang Pu, and Yang Xiaobin, among others, by using Laura Doyle’s theorization of interimperiality as an often-gendered form of labor through which subjects negotiate the “everyday ethical challenge” of survival under multiple imperial structures. The construction and positioning of transimperial subjects in the creative work of China scholars resists forms of imperial power that serve to marginalize, erase, and invalidate the cross-cultural, experiential knowledge at the heart of China studies. By making scholarly betweenness legible and visible, the work of scholar-poets takes steps toward an interimperial style in both poetry and criticism, a meeting place in language that can accept in migration from many directions and build solidarity among diverse thinkers united by the needs of survival under empire.]
Barlow, Tani. “Colonialism’s Career in Postwar China Studies.” positions. 1, 1 (1993): 224-67.
Berry, Michael. “The Translator’s Studio: A Dialogue with Howard Goldblatt.” Persimmon 3, 2 (Summer 2002): 18-25.
Carver, Ann. “Can One Read Cross-Culturally.” In Ann Carver and Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, eds., Bamboo Shoots After the Rain: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers in Taiwan. NY: The Feminist Press, 1990, 210-16.
Chan, Leonard K. K. “‘Literary Science’ and ‘Literary Criticism’: The Prusek-Hsia Debate.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Crossing between Tradition and Modernity: Essays in Commemoration of Milena Doleželová-Velingerová (1932-2012). Prague: Karolinum, 2016, 25-43.
Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne. “Contexts of Taiwan Studies in the U.S. Academe.” In Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, eds. Cultural Discourse in Taiwan. Kaohsiung: Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, 2009, 10-29.
—–. “Building a Modern Institution of Literature: The Case of Taiwan.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 116-33.
Chen, Kuan-hsing. “The Imperialist Eye: The Cultural Imaginary of a Subempire and a Nation-State.” Positions 8, 1 (Spring 2000): 9-76.
Chen, Li-fen. “The Cultural Turn in the Study of Modern Chinese Literature: Rey Chow and Diasporic Self-Writing.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 1 (Spring 2000): 43-80.
Chen, Pingyuan. “Destiny and Options of Contemporary Chinese Scholars of the Humanities.” Contemporary Chinese Thought 29, 2 (Winter 1997/98): 5-28.
—–. “Scholarship, Ideas, Politics.” In Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths. London: Verso, 2003, 108-27.
—–. “The Story of Literary History.” In Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 92-111.
Chen, Sihe. “On ‘Invisible Writing’ in the History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, 1949-1976.” Tr. Hongbing Zhang. MCLC Resource Center Publication (2000).
—–. “1988, July 1: Rewriting Literary History in the New Era of Liberated Thought.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 787-91.
Chen, Xiaoming. “Antiradicalism and the Historical Situation of Contemporary Chinese Intellectuals.” Contemporary Chinese Thought 29, 2 (Winter 1997/98): 29-44.
—–. “The Chinese Perspective and the Assessment of Contemporary Chinese Literature.” Tr. Nancy Tsai. Chinese Literature Today (Winter/Spring 2011): 23-27.
Chen, Ya-chen. “French Feminist Theories in Wenyi lilun of the 1990s.” Feminismo/s 3 (2004): 235-260. [Abstract]
Chiu, Kuei-fen. “Empire of the Chinese Sign: The Question of Chinese Diasporic Imagination in Transnational Literary Production.” Journal of Asian Studies 67, 2 (May 2008): 593-620.
[Abstract: This paper begins with an examination of the burgeoning interest in literatures in Chinese. It argues that studies in literatures in Chinese map out a terrain where complex negotiations and interventions for different purposes are carried out. As studies in literatures in Chinese often imply a shift from the nation-state paradigm to the transnational paradigm, which implicitly celebrates diasporic imagination as a counterforce to the power of the nation-state, this paper proposes to examine the intersection of Chinese Malaysian literature and Taiwan literature at two specific moments of transnational literary production—the late 1970s to the mid-1980s and the late 1990s to the present—so as to demonstrate the unstable meanings of the diaspora sign. It highlights the importance of historicization in investigating phenomena of transnational cultural production and the need to reincorporate the notion of “place” into our agenda in conducting cultural critiques. The paper ends with a critique of the global city as a methodological concept and argues for a place paradigm without privileging the global city as a metaphor for transnational space.]
Chow, Rey. “The Politics and Pedagogy of Asian Literatures in American Universities.” In Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: IUP, 1993, 120-43.
—–. “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem.” boundary 2 25, 3 (1998): 1-24. Rpt. in Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
—–. ed. Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Originally published as special issue of boundary 2 25, 3 (1998).
“C. T. Hsia: In Memoriam.” Special section of Chinese Literature Today 4, 1 (2014): 108-27.
[Contents: includes essays by David Wang, Christopher Rea, Christopher Lupke, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Charles Laughlin, Joseph Lau, Jon Eugene von Kowallis, Michael Duke, and Howard Goldblatt]
Davies, Gloria. “Chinese Literary Studies and Post-Structuralist Positions: What Next?” The Australian Journal of Chinese Studies 28 (July 1991): 67-86.
—–. “Theory, Professionalism, and Chinese Studies.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 1 (Spring 2000): 1-42.
—–. Worrying About China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. [HUP blurb]
Denton, Kirk. “Teaching Modern Chinese Literature in the Post-Modern Era.” Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association 26, 2 (1991): 1-24.
Dirlik, Arif. “Looking Backward in the Age of Global Capital: Thoughts on History in Third World Cultural Criticism.” In Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder, eds., In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996, 183-216.
Dissanayake, Wimal. “Cultural Studies: The Challenges Ahead For Asian Scholars.” Chinese/International Comparative Literature Bulletin 1 (1996): 2-19.
Duke, Michael. “The Problematic Nature of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Fiction in English Translation.” In Goldblatt, ed., Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1990, 198-227.
—–. “Thoughts on Politics and Critical Paradigms in Modern Chinese Literature Studies.” Modern China 19, 1 (1993): 41-70.
—–. “Everyday Resistance to Postmodern Theory.” Tamkang Review 30, 3 (Spring 2000): 7-50.
Eoyang, Eugene. “Greater China and the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 1, 1 (1997): 1-12.
—–. “Tianya, the Ends of the World or the Edge of Heaven: Comparative Literature at the Fin de Siecle.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999, 218-32.
Fitzgerald, John. “In the Scales of History: Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century China.” Twentieth-Century China 24, 2 (April 1999): 1-28. [with responses and comments by Prasenjit Duara, Tani Barlow, Richard Krauss, William C. Kirby, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Richard Madsen, and John Fitzgerald]
Galik, Marian. “Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the Study of Post-1918 Chinese Literature.” In Goldblatt, ed., Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1990, 231-45.
—–. “Marginalia to the Contemporary Situation in Chinese Comparative Literature Studies.” Chinese/International Comparative Literature Bulletin 4/5 (1992): 2-5.
—–. “Cultural Identity and the Intercultural East-West Process: Theoretical and Practical Considerations.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 12, 2 (2003): 113-21.
—–. “Three from the Sino-European Babel: Cherkassky, Malmquist, Kubin and Translation of the Twentieth Century Chinese Poetry in Europe.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 14, 2 (2005): 158-66.
—–. “Prelimary Remarks on the Prague School of Sinology I.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 19, 2 (2010): 197-219.
—–. “Preliminary Remarks on the Pragues School of Sinology II.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 20, 1 (2011): 95-113.
Ge, Haowen. “A Mi Manera: Howard Goldblatt at Home: A Self-Interview.” Chinese Literature Today 2, 1 (2011): 97-104.
Goldblatt, Howard. “Kai-yu Hsu and Modern Chinese Literature.” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 20, 1 (1985): 1-8.
—–. “Memory, Speak.” Chinese Literature Today 2, 1 (2011): 93-96.
Gotz, Michael. “The Development of Modern Chinese Literature Studies in the West: A Critical View.” Modern China 2, 2 (April 1976): 397-416.
Gu, Ming Dong. Sinologism: An Alternative to Orientalism and Postcolonialism. NY: Routledge, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Gang Zhou]
Gunn, Edward. “Recent Trends in Chinese Literary Studies.” China Exchange News 21, 3/4 (1993): 2-8.
Hockx, Michel. “Constructing the Innocent Reader: Western Doubts About Modern Chinese Literature.” In Paul van der Velde, ed., IIAS Yearbook, 1995. Leiden, 1996.
—–. “Theory as Practice: Modern Chinese Literature and Bourdieu.” In Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits, eds., Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary Theory. New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, 220-39.
Hockx, Michel and Ivo Smits, eds., Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary Theory. New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.
Hsia, C.T. “On the ‘Scientific’ Study of Modern Chinese Literature–A Reply to Professor Prusek.” In Prusek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies in Modern Chinese Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980, 231-66.
Hu, Sang. “Introduction: Wolfgang Kubin.” Tr. Josh Stenberg. Chinese Literature Today 6, 2 (2017): 108-09.
—–. “The Thirst for Another Kind of Life: An Interview with Wolfgang Kubin.” Tr. Josh Sternberg. Chinese Literature Today 6, 2 (2017): 118-27.
In Memoriam of Yingjin Zhang, special issue of Chinese Literature and Thought Today 54, 3-4 (2023).
[essays by Geraldine Fiss, Dudley Andrew, Sheldon Lu, Ban Wang, Paul G. Pickowicz, Carlos Rojas, Yiwen Wang, Dingding Wang, Angie Chau, Charles Laughlin, Pai Wang, Liang Luo, Daisuke Miyao, Ping Zhu, Xiaojiao Wang, Christopher Lupke, and Yomi Braester]
Jenner, W. J. F. “Insuperable Barriers? Some Thoughts on the Reception of Chinese Writing in English Translation.” In Goldblatt, ed., Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1990, 177-97.
Ji, Jin. “Reflections on Concepts, Categories, and Fuzzy Boundaries: An Interview with Carlos Rojas.” Chinese Literature Today 7, 1 (2018): 131-42.
[Abstract: In this interview conducted by the China-based scholar Ji Jin, Carlos Rojas talks about a wide array of topics, including his academic pedigree, his cross-cultural approach, his opinion on current Sinology, the relationship between Chinese literature and world literature, and his current and future projects. The interview also contains extensive discussions on translation and some key themes in Rojas’s scholarship.]
Kao, Karl. “Comparative Literature and the Ideology of Metaphor, East and West.” Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal. 2, 4 (2000).
Kubin, Wolfgang. “What Is Good Chinese? Toward the Problem of Literature in the Chinese Commonwealth.” Comparative Literature: East and West 15, 2 (Aut./Winter 2011): 1-12.
Lan, H.R. “Working Toward a New Canon.” Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association. 26, 2 (1991): 33-50.
Lee, Haiyan. “Latour, Tiananmen, and Glass Slippers, Or, What We Talk about When We Talk about Chinese Studies.” Prism 17, 2 (Oct. 2020).
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “1962-1963: The Legacies of Jaroslav Prusek and C. T. Hsia.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 644-50.
Lee, Tong King. “Mobility as Method: Distributed Literatures and Semiotic Repertoires.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (March 2019).
Li, Yongli. “Writing Trauma: From Translation to Oral History, an Interview with Michael Berry.” Chinese Literature Today 9, 1 (2020): 80-88.
Lin, Hao. “The Text and the Extra-Textual: Dutch Sinologist Maghiel van Crevel and His Research on Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” Tr. Yingying Huang. Chinese Literature Today 8, 1 (2019): 124-26.
Lin, Shuming and He Songyu. “Feminist Literary Criticism in China since the Mid-1990s.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 35-52.
Link, Perry. “Ideology and Theory in the Study of Modern Chinese Literature: An Introduction.” Modern China 19, 1 (1993): 4-12.
Liu, Kang. “Politics, Critical Paradigms: Reflections on Modern Chinese Literature Studies.” Modern China 19, 1 (1993): 13-40.
—–. “Politics of Interpretation: Changing Paradigms in Modern Chinese Literature Studies.” China Report 6 (1991): 1-19.
Liu Zaifu. “Eileen Chang’s Fiction and C. T. Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (July 2009).
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[Abstract: Taking its inspiration from a line in Chinese that appears in an episode of the popular US television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this essay reflects on the broader phenomenon of minor or minoritized discourses and, specifically, insofar as it relates to modern Chinese literature. The focus, however, is not on discursive formations positioned at the margins of what might be regarded as mainstream Chinese literature (such as ethnic minority literature, Sinophone literature, and so forth), but rather on works by authors who may be viewed as paradigmatically canonical.]
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[Abstract: In the age of globalization, intellectuals, writers, critics and literary and cultural studies scholars cannot but take pains to conceive or picture the future orientation of elite literature since elite literature is being challenged by popular literature and culture, and literary studies by Cultural Studies. The present essay tries to describe a new orientation of Chinese literature studies, or more specifically, to observe modern Chinese literature in a broad context of world literature and reach a rewriting of contemporary Chinese literary culture from an international and comparative point of view. In reperiodizing modern Chinese literature, the author points out that in the global age, the new framework of world culture in the twenty-first century is characterized by different cultures coming to dialogue and merging to some degree rather than ‘cultural conflict’. With this broad background, twentieth century Chinese literature should be re-examined from an international and comparative perspective. The paper also points out that rewriting literary history must be associated with issues of canon formation and reformation, that is, to offer new interpretations from theoretical perspectives of canonical literary works. The author discusses several considerations involved in canon selection: reception and market success, recognition of critical circles, and inclusion in university curriculum.
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—–. “Rethinking Modern Chinese Literature in a Global Context.” Modern Language Quarterly 69, 1 (2008): 1-11.
—–. “Rethinking Modern Chinese Fiction in a Global Context.” Neohelicon 37, 2 (Dec. 2010): 319-27.
[Abstract: Modern Chinese literature is most open in the history of Chinese literature, with various Western literary currents and cultural trends flooding into China. As the most important and popular genre in Chinese literature, modern Chinese novel has been developing under the Western influence, and it has played a vital role in flourishing modern Chinese literature and enlightening modern Chinese intellectuals and the broad reading public. To the author, toward the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese literature was almost “marginalized”. In order to resume its lost grandeur it moved from periphery to centre by identifying itself with Western cultural modernity or modern Western literature. To realize this grand and ambitious aim, translating novel became an important task. In dealing with the Western influence, the author also reperiodizes twentieth-century Chinese literature: modern literature started with the May 4th Movement in 1919 and ended in 1976; since 1976, Chinese literature has been in the contemporary era, which is characterized by more postmodern than modern. In this global context, Chinese fiction writing has become part of world literature and been developing in a pluralistic direction.]
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—–, ed. “Outside the Gurus’ Sandboxes: Reconsidering Common Assumptions in the Contemporary Study of Modern Chinese Literature.” Special issue of Tamkang Review 30, 3 (Spring 2000).
—–. “Can We Paradigm? Re-examining the Mimetic Heresy and Some Other Imbroglios in Recent Western-language Academic Studies of Modern Chinese Literature.” Tamkang Review 30, 3 (Spring 2000): 109-146.
—–. “Janus-faced Popularization in 20th-century Chinese Fiction: A Critical Quandary.” Tamkang Review 31, 3 (Spring 2001): 41-64.
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[Abstract: This paper provides a cross-cultural discussion of the dynamics and problems of cultural studies. I examine Simon During’s genealogy of cultural studies in the context of the current crisis of the American higher education. I explain why there is no longer “aura”—in the Benjaminian sense—oncollege campuses, and how this lack of aura is related to the global dominance of neoliberalism both as a set of economic policies serving the free markets and as a political rationality governing education and the everyday life. I present several preliminary countermeasure sagainst neoliberalism. One of them is to incorporate cultural studies in literary studies—not the other way around—so as to use the aura as a critical tool against neoliberalism, to re-establish the core values of literature in teaching moral and political responsibilities as well as public goodness. The paper ends with a brief reading of WongKar-wai’s latest film 2046 as an allegory of the auratic event.]
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—–. “Chinese Postmodernism and the Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Poetry.” Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Cross-Cultural Readings of Chineseness: Narratives, Images, and Interpretations of the 1990s. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 2000, 100-27.
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—–. “Out of the Cultural Ghetto: Theory, Politics, and the Study of Chinese Literature.” Modern China 19, 1 (1993): 71-101.
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—–. “Modern Chinese Literature as an Institution: Canon and Literary History.” In Joshua Mostow, ed., The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia University Press, 20o3, 324-32. Rpt. in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 27-37.
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