NEW PUBLICATION: Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature: Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces
Edited By Riccardo Moratto, Nicoletta Pesaro, and Di-kai Chao
Routledge, 2022
Focusing on ecocritical aspects throughout Chinese literature, particularly modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the contributors to this book examine the environmental and ecological dimensions of notions such as qing (情) and jing (境).
Chinese modern and contemporary environmental writing offers a unique aesthetic perspective toward the natural world. Such a perspective is mainly ecological and allows human subjects to take a benign and nonutilitarian attitude toward nature. The contributors to this book demonstrate how Chinese literary ecology tends toward an ecological-systemic holism from which all human behaviors should be closely examined. They do so by examining a range of writers and genres, including Liu Cixin’s science fiction, Wu Ming-yi’s environmental fiction, and Zhang Chengzhi’s historical narratives.
This book provides valuable insights for scholars and students looking to understand how Chinese literature conceptualizes the relationship between humanity and nature, as well as our role and position within the natural realm.
Table of Contents
Part I Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature 1. Trees Keep Time: An Ecocritical Approach to Literary Temporality 2. Transcultural Landscape and Modernity in a Feng Zhi Sonnet: Sound, Silence, and the Lesson of Metamorphosis 3. Nonhuman Poetics (By Way of Wang Guowei) 4. Shared Sensibilities: Human-Environment Relationship in Contemporary Chinese Poetry 5. The Writing of Inner/Outer World and Ecopoetics in Contemporary Chinese Poetry: An Analysis of Zang Di’s Poetic Creation 6. Rethinking the Urban Form: Overpopulation, Resource Depletion, and Chinese Cities in Science Fiction 7. Representing Environmental Issues in Post-1990s Chinese Science Fiction: Technological Imaginary and Ecological Concerns
Part II Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces 8. Bridging Qing (Emotions) and Jing (Natural Realm): Fei Ming’s Eco-Poetics in Bridge 9. (Un)natural Landscapes and Can Xue’s Re-interpretation of “Tianrenheyi” 10. Autopoiesis and Sympoiesis: Imagining Post-Anthropocene in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction 11. Feeling the Catastrophe: Affective Ecocriticism in Liu Cixin’s “The Wandering Earth” 12. Environmental Nostalgia from Idyll to Disillusionment: Zhang Chengzhi’s Inner Mongolia from Short Stories to Essays 13. History, Landscape and Living Things in the Work of Wu Ming-yi 14. Situationality in Tropical Malaysia: A Literary Sense of Place in Ng Kim-chew’s Fiction