MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Pu Wang’s review of Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959, by Mingwei Song. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/pu-wang/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC book review editor for literary studies, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

By Mingwei Song

Reviewed by Pu Wang

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2023)

Mingwei Song, Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. xiv+379 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-08839-9 (cloth).

Mingwei Song’s Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 opens with a discussion of the beginning of the young protagonist’s journey in Ye Shengtao’s 葉聖陶 novel Ni Huanzhi 倪煥之, which Song identifies as “the first major Chinese novel to showcase the formative experience of a modern youth” (1-2). Song’s Prologue is accordingly titled “The Beginning of the Journey.” Concepts and emotions associated with a young person setting out on a journey are central to Song’s literary historical narrative. As the author notes, the beginning of the journey “is highly allegorical. Journey and dream, passion and promise, hope and future—these elements constitute the foundation of a master plot of China’s modern story about youth” (1); the point is reiterated throughout, as in this later observation: “In the Bildungsroman of the new youth generation, the protagonist’s journey stands as a central motif” (237). Terms associated with the young person’s journey and its affects reappear like touchstones throughout this engaging monograph.

Song’s book-length study of this “master plot,” this “motif” of the journey in the Chinese Bildungsroman of the first half of the twentieth century, can also be read as a critical journey, or more precisely, a genealogy of the various journeys and beginnings of the new youth depicted in modern Chinese discourse and fiction from the late Qing era through the socialist period. The book thus combines a critical study of the “Chinese vision of youth”—in its dynamic and complicated relationship to national rejuvenation as that relationship played out in intellectual discourses—with a brilliant exploration of “fictional representations of young people in modern Chinese novels that integrate the individual’s Bildung into the different visions of national rejuvenation” (8). Continue reading →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Paola Iovene’s review of Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature, by Jiwei Xiao. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/iovene/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk A. Denton, MCLC

By Jiwei Xiao

Reviewed by Paola Iovene

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright April, 2023)

Jiwei Xiao. Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature New York: Routledge, 2022, xiv + 212 pp. ISBN: 9781032197852 (cloth).

Telling Details reassesses the contours of Chinese literary modernity by excavating the “novel of details” 細節小說: not a genre, but a “literary phenomenon” (2) in which details “become the drivers of the novel, decentering the plot and forming the core interest of the text” (1). The novel of details, the book argues, emerged in late sixteenth-century China and constitutes one of the earliest manifestations of the modern novel worldwide. By mingling “high and low forms” (1), consistently engaging sensuous experience, and adopting an episodic form in which “waves of interlinked mini scenes advance the storytelling” (2), the novel of details offers, in Xiao’s view, China’s most remarkable contribution to world literature, continuing to shape Chinese fiction to this day. Telling Details reinvigorates the practice of literary criticism by offering imaginative “slow readings” informed by the author’s passion for cinema and guided by her literary sensibility. The book unsettles dichotomies of realism and modernism, lyrical and narrative, and sheds new light on a remarkable range of issues, authors, and texts. Continue reading →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Virginia L. Conn’s review of The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/conn/. My thanks to Michael Hill, our translation/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang

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Reviewed by Virginia L. Conn

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright April, 2023)

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Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, eds. The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories New York: Tor, 2022. 400 pp. ISBN: 978-1-250-76891-9 (Hardback).

An anthology, like any material product, is a cultural object that moves through the world. It does not exist independently of context—on either the creative or receiving end—and thus means different things to different people. The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories is a collection with a deliberately ambiguous context: written, translated, and edited by what the cover labels a “visionary team of female and non-binary creators,” the stories contained within may mean very different things to Sinophone and/or Anglophone readers, not least of which is what role gender plays in the stories and how we are intended to receive them as a result.

A collection of seventeen pieces of science fiction and five nonfiction essays, The Way Spring Arrives (TWSA) is edited by the inimitable Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang and was released in early 2022 by Tor. The anthology as a whole treats gender as a mechanism for creating and transmitting cultural values and, as a result, gender itself as an act of speculative worldbuilding that often leaves the specifics of how it functions unexamined. In fact, rather than a collection of methods and practices for dismantling extant approaches to gender, TWSA is better understood as a collection at the nexus of three issues that are both co-constitutive and co-confounding: gender, translation, and speculation. What does it mean to write a text as/for/about the non-male other, and how do we recognize this otherness? What happens when non-maleness encompasses a range of experiences, embodiments, and perspectives that are not necessarily shared, nor are commensurable or recognizable across cultures? How do we speculate about the way such identities and the societies that produce them might change in the future when we’re not necessarily in agreement about what they stand for now? Continue reading →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Nathaniel Isaacson’s review of Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity, by Theodore Huters. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/isaacson-2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

By Theodore Huters

Reviewed by Nathaniel Isaacson

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March, 2023)

Theodore Huters, Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2022. ix + 288 pp. ISBN: 9781621966166 (cloth); ISBN: 9781638571346 (paper).

Rigorous attention to language is what makes literary and intellectual history a discipline, but it can also feel kind of tedious. What is Confucianism; what is China; what is a Sinograph? There are two popular approaches to this problem, the first being a diligent delineation of one’s methodology in which all such terms and concepts are carefully set forth, and even omissions are explained. The other approach is to cast most of that aside, and if your readers claim they don’t know what Confucianism is, then to hell with them anyway. Theodore Huters’ latest book, Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity, takes a third tack, which is to dwell rather comfortably in the ambiguity of a number of such key words. The book “looks at the challenges posed by ‘modernity’” in China circa 1895-1920 (3), explaining both how knotty and how significant to the country’s history “modernity”—whatever it may be—and its pursuit have become.

One of Sinology’s grand challenges lies in understanding the vital importance and polyvalence of concepts like modernity, and how this ephemerality manifested in other intellectual spheres and organizational structures. Huters identifies a number of attendant keywords associated with the pursuit of modernity that share similar misprisions, among them a certainty about their significance that belies their polysemous nature, demonstrating how concepts like “literature,” “vernacular,” “translation,” “popular literature,” have remained persistently as elusive as they are vital to China’s project of national development. Coming to terms with this vocabulary has been and continues to be a major task confronting the fields of modern Chinese intellectual and literary history. Continue reading →