Chinese Literature and Culture in the Era of Global Capitalism

Dear Colleagues,

I’m happy to announce the publication of my new book Chinese Literature and Culture in the Era of Global Capitalism: Renaissance or Rehabilitation? (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021). Combining anatomies of textual examples with broader contextual considerations related with the social, political and economic developments of post-Mao China, Xiaoping Wang intends to explore newly emerging social and cultural trends in contemporary China, and find the truth content of Chinese society and culture in the age of global capitalism. Through in-depth textual analyses covering a variety of media, ranging from fiction, poetry, film to theoretical works as well as cultural phenomena which mirror social and cultural occurrences and reflect the present ideological proclivities of the Chinese society, this study offers timely interpretations of China in the age of globalization, its political inclinations, social fashions and cultural tendencies, and provides thought-provoking messages of China’s socio-economic and political reality.

For more details, click the following link,

https://brill.com/view/title/60028

For some blurbs:

“This is a unique book.  Both in depth and in scope, its generative application of Raymond Williams’s “three types of culture”—the dominant, the residual, and the emergent—succeeds in illuminating the ideological dynamics manifested in Chinese literature and culture since the start of the reform era.  Juxtaposing textual readings and dialogic engagement with existing scholarship on contemporary Chinese literature, culture, and intellectual debates, Renaissance or Rehabilitation? Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism ventures into both understudied texts and familiar ones, and foregrounds provocative arguments. A must read for anyone interested in a dialectic understanding of the extent to which contemporary Chinese literature and culture can be studied.” —–Zhong Xueping, Professor, Director of China Program, Tufts University

With astute observation, nuanced critique and passionate engagement, Xiaoping Wang’s Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism offers illuminating insights into reform-era China’s extraordinarily complex, contentious and dynamic cultural politics. The book is truly a tour de force. Not only is it highly successful in situating China’s ongoing search for cultural identity both vis-à-vis its own history and in relation to the outside world, but it also successfully amplifies a clear and resounding call for a renaissance of China’s socialist culture. Based primarily on literary, cinematic and intellectual critique of a wide range of texts and debates, the book demands a lot from those who are not Chinese cultural specialists; however, it’s a worthy intellectual endeavor for anybody who wishes to look beyond the headlines and familiar tropes to understand China’s future path. I highly recommend this book to students and scholars of all fields.——-Yuezhi Zhao, Fellow of Royal Society of Canada

This monograph is a solid what-is-going-on book that is on the leading edge in the field. It ambitiously offers a big picture vision of Chinese literary history to account for the intersection between postmodern superstructure and its postsocialist reality, a complex contradiction worthy of pondering in China’s age of global capital. The monograph not only keeps abreast of recent scholarships in both Chinese and English, but also provides its readers substantive knowledge of primary sources and offers much needed synthesis of current research and debates in contemporary Chinese literary and intellectual circles from an angle that does justice to China’s socialist reality. Many of its chapters stand as inspiring case studies on specific literary or filmic texts, illustrating the strength of historical analysis and class analysis that shake up the usual humanist and formalist reading of these texts so prevalent in scholarships in English.—Zhang Zhen, Associate Professor of Chinese Literature, Union College, USA

 Posted by: Xiaoping Wang <wxping75@163.com>

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