Announcing the publication of:
Choy, Howard Y. F., ed. Discourses of Disease: Writing Illness, the Mind and Body in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
http://www.brill.com/products/book/discourses-disease
The meanings of disease have undergone such drastic changes with the introduction of modern Western medicine into China during the last two hundred years that new discourses have been invented to theorize illness, redefine health, and reconstruct classes and genders. As a consequence, medical literature is rewritten with histories of hygiene, studies of psychopathology, and stories of cancer, disabilities and AIDS. This edited volume includes studies of discourses about both bodily and psychiatric illness in modern China, bringing together ground-breaking scholarships that reconfigure the fields of history, literature, film, psychology, anthropology, and gender studies by tracing the pathological path of the “Sick Man of East Asia” through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the new millennium.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Disease and Discourse
Howard Y. F. Choy
Part I. Hygiene and Psychosis: From Routine to Poetry
1. James Henderson’s Shanghai Hygiene and the British Constitution in Early Modern China
Stephanie Villalta Puig
2. Curing Unhappiness in Revolutionary China: Optimism under Socialism and Capitalism
Wendy Larson
3. Metaphors unto Themselves: Mental Illness Poetics and Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Poetry
Birgit Linder
Part II. Drug and Cancer: From Nation to Fiction
4. Unmaking of Nationalism: Drug Addiction and Its Literary Imagination in Bi Shumin’s Novel
Haomin Gong
5. Narrative as Therapy: Stories of Breast Cancer by Bi Shumin and Xi Xi
Howard Y. F. Choy
6. Narrating Cancer, Disabilities, and AIDS: Yan Lianke’s Trilogy of Disease
Shelley W. Chan
Part III. AIDS and Virus: From Film to Forum
7. Reluctant Transcendence: AIDS and the Catastrophic Condition in Gu Changwei’s Film Love for Life
Kun Qian
8. Alone Together: Contagion, Stigmatization and Utopia as Therapy in Zhao Liang’s AIDS Documentary Together
Li Li
9. The Unknown Virus: The Social Logic of Bio-conspiracy Theories in Contemporary China
Kevin Carrico