| Poetry | Drama | Prose and Reportage | Literary Criticism |
Poetry
Admussen, Nick. “Trading Metaphors: Chinese Prose Poetry and the Reperiodization of the Twentieth Century.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22, 2 (Fall 2010): 88-129.
—–. Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016. [MCLC Resource Center review by Paul Manfredi]
[Abstract: Chinese prose poetry today is engaged with a series of questions that are fundamental to the modern Chinese language: What is prose? What is it good for? How should it look and sound? Millions of Chinese readers encounter prose poetry every year, both in the most official of state-sponsored magazines and in the unorthodox, experimental work of the avant-garde. Recite and Refuse makes their answers to our questions about prose legible by translating, surveying, and interpreting prose poems, studying the people, politics, and contexts that surround the writing of prose poetry. Admussen argues that unlike most genres, Chinese prose poems lack a distinct size or shape. Their similarity to other prose is the result of a distinct process in which a prose form is recited with some kind of meaningful difference—an imitation that refuses to fully resemble its source. This makes prose poetry a protean, ever-changing group of works, channeling the language of science, journalism, Communist Party politics, advertisements, and much more. The poems look vastly different as products, but are made with a similar process. Focusing on the composition process allows Admussen to rewrite the standard history of prose poetry, finding its origins not in 1918 but in the obedient socialist prose poetry of the 1950s. Recite and Refuse places the work of state-sponsored writers in mutual relationship to prose poems by unorthodox and avant-garde poets, from cadre writers like Ke Lan and Guo Feng to the border-crossing intellectual and poet Liu Zaifu to experimental artists such as Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan. The volume features never-before seen English translations that range from the representative to the exceptional, culminating with Ouyang Jianghe’s masterpiece “Hanging Coffin.” Reading across the spectrum enables us to see the way that artists interact with each other, how they compete and cooperate, and how their interactions, as well as their creations, continuously reinvent both poetry and prose.]
—–. “1945, August 1: Ideologies of Sound in Chinese Modernity Poetry.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 512-16.
—–. “Network Analysis as a Modernist Intervention: The Case of Chinese Poetry Readings.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 261-82.
—–. “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.]
Au, Chung-to. Modernist Aesthetics in Taiwanese Poetry since the 1950s. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
[Abstract: Much of the previous scholarship on Taiwanese modernist poetry easily falls into ideological arguments. This book participates in the development of an alternative approach to understanding Taiwanese modernist poetry. Dr. Au’s approach emphasizes the diversity and intensity of experiences of place and placelessness in the work of five poets: Lomen, Luo Fu, Rong Zi, Yu Guangzhong and Zheng Chouyu. The phenomenon of placelessness is a problem in all modernity and so modern aesthetics is an outgrowth of modern society’s sense of placelessness. This book not only shows how place becomes placelessness but also analyses Taiwanese modernist poets’ responses to the phenomenon of placelessness. Four kinds of places are examined, namely, the house, the city, homeland and an imagined literary community, in this work. The result is both refreshing and original.]
Bai, Ling. “The Era after Social Diversification: Developments in Taiwanese Poetry 1985-1990.” Trs. Duncan Hewitt and Chu Chiyu. Renditions 35/36 (1991): 294-98.
Bien, Gloria. Baudelaire in China: A Study in Literary Reception. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Nick Admussen]
[Abstract: Baudelaire’s work entered China in the twentieth century amidst political and social upheavals accompanied by a “literary revolution” that called for the overthrow of classical models and modes of expression to be replaced by vernacular language and contemporary content. Chinese writers welcomed their meeting with the West and openly embraced Western literature as providing models in developing their “new” literature. Baudelaire’s reception in China provides a representative study of this “meeting of East and west.” His work, which has been declared to stand between tradition and modernity, also lies at the intersection between classical and modern literature in China. Many of the best known and most highly regarded writers in twentieth-century China were drawn to Baudelaire’s work, and some addressed it directly in their own writings. Bien draws upon H.R. Jauss’s theory of the shifting and expanding horizons of expectation in the reading and interpretation of a literary work, and upon James J. Y. Liu’s notion of “worlds” received and created by both author and reader, to show how poetic lines, images, and ideas, as well as Chinese critics’ comments, eventually weave into a rich picture of Baudelaire’s reception in China.]
Bradbury, Steven. “On the Taipei Avant-garde: Is this the End of Poetry Now?” Jacket 2 no. 35 (April 2008).
—–. “‘More than Writing, As We Speak’: An Interview with Maghiel van Crevel on the Chinese Poetic Avant-Garde.” Full Tilt 4 (Summer 2009).
—–. “Have Net, Will Travel: The New Face of Chinese Poetry.” Jacket 2 (2011).
Bruno, Cosima. “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.
—–. “Contemporary Poetry from Macau.” A journal of post-colonial theory (Oct. 23, 2013).
—–. “Shared Sensibilities: Human-Environment Relationship in Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” In Riccardo Moratto, Nicoletta Pesaro, and Di-kai Chao, eds., Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature: Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces. London: Routledge, 2022, 55-69.
Bruno, Cosima. 2022. “Animal Talk: The Sentient and the Sensible in Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” Transpositiones 1 (2022): 149–164.
Chen, Peng-hsiang. “A Mythopoetic Discourse on Modern Chinese (Taiwanese) Poems.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 13, 2 (2004): 141-54.
Chen, Xiaomei. “Misunderstanding Western Modernism: The Menglong Movement in Post-Mao China.” Representations 35 (Summer 1991): 143-63. Rpt. in Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China. NY: Oxford UP, 1995, 69-98.
Chen, Yongguo. “Becoming-Obscure: A Constant in the Development of Modern Chinese Poetry.” Modern Language Quarterly 69, 1 (2008): 81-96.
[Abstract: Both historically and theoretically, this essay traces the development of modern Chinese poetry, including the Chinese symbolists of the 1920s, the modernists of the 1930s, the Nine Leaves of the 1940s, the obscurists of the 1970s, and the post-obscurists of the Third Generation of the 1980s, to the Western source from which the Chinese New Poets learned the techniques of modern Western poetry and introduced them into China by way of adaptation and imitation. At that point a new leaf was turned in the history of Chinese poetry: the mingling of the foreign elements, especially the obscurant that was constant in Western poetry, with vernacular Chinese expression gave birth to the New Poetry.]
Chen, Youkang. “The Legitimacy and Modernity of Chinese Traditional Poetry and Lyrics in the 20th Century.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 3, 1 (2009): 1-23.
Cheng, Yu-yu, Ming-Tak Ted Hui, and Chien-Hsin Tsai. “The ‘Natural Rhythm’ of Chinese Poetry: Physical and Linguistic Perspective since 1919.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 3, 2 (Nov. 2016): 215-32.
[Abstract: During the literary revolution, Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) advocated the concept of natural rhythm, emphasizing the liberation of sound and the segmentation of meaning. Since 1919, his writings have attracted a great number of writers to reconceptualize the meaning and function of poetry and language. This study reviews critical discussions of the relationships among sound, meaning, and poetry by a number of Chinese scholars, from Tang Yue 唐鉞 (1891–1987) and Hu Pu’an 胡樸安 (1878–1947), to Chen Shih-hsiang 陳世驤 (1912–71), among others. Their discussions of rhythm and the relation it has to emotion and motion have yet to attract enough critical attention in the English-speaking world. This article explains how these scholars built on or challenged Hu Shi’s findings to provide new ways of assessing the production of sound and meaning in Chinese language and literature.]
Cheung, Dominic. “New Directions in Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” In Wai-lim Yip, ed., Chinese Arts and Literature: A Survey of Recent Trends. Occasional Papers/Reprint Series in Contemporary Asian Studies. Baltimore, 1977, 59-68.
—–. “The Continuity of Modern Chinese Poetry in Taiwan.” World Literature Today 65, 3 (1991): 399-404.
China–Poetry International Web (edited by Simon Patton) [this is the China section of the Poetry International website]
Chong, Woei Lien. “Some Problems of Modern Chinese Poetry: A Conversation Between Lloyd Haft and Leo Ou-fan Lee.” China Information 7, 1 (1992): 40-46.
Crespi, John A.. A Vocal Minority: New Poetry and Poetry Declamation in China, 1915-1975. Ph.d. diss. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000.
—–. “Calculated Passions: The Lyric and the Theatric in Mao-era Poetry Recitation.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 2 (Fall 2001): 72-110.
—–. “Form and Reform: New Poetry and the Crescent Moon Society.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 364-70. Rpt in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 121-27.
—–. “The Poetry of Slogans and Native Sons: Observations on the First China Poetry Festival.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (Nov. 2005). [essay on the First China Poetry Festival, a state-sponsored event held in Ma’anshan, Anhui in October, 2005]
—–. Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009.
[Abstract: China’s century of revolutionary change has been heard as much as seen, and nowhere is this more evident than in an auditory history of the modern Chinese poem. From Lu Xun’s seminal writings on literature to a recitation renaissance in urban centers today, poetics meets politics in the sounding voice of poetry. Supported throughout by vivid narration and accessible analysis, Voices offers a literary history of modern China that makes the case for the importance of the auditory dimension of poetry in national, revolutionary, and postsocialist culture. Crespi brings the past to life by first examining the ideological changes to poetic voice during China’s early twentieth-century transition from empire to nation. He then traces the emergence of the spoken poem from the May Fourth period to the present, including its mobilization during the Anti-Japanese War, its incorporation into the student protest repertoire during China’s civil war, its role as a conflicted voice of Mao-era revolutionary passion, and finally its current adaptation to the cultural life of China’s party-guided market economy. Voices alters the way we read by moving poems off the page and into the real time and space of literary activity. To all readers it offers an accessible yet conceptually fresh and often dramatic narration of China’s modern literary experience. Specialists will appreciate the book’s inclusion of noncanonical texts as well as its innovative interdisciplinary approach.]
—–. “The Treasure-Seekers: The Poetry of Social Function in a Beijing Recitation Club.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22, 2 (Fall 2010): 1-38.
Day, Michael. “Poetry.” Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS), Leiden Division. [study of contemporary Chinese poetry websites]
—–. “The Born-Again Forest: A Preliminary Chapter in the Post-Misty Development of Avant-Garde Poetry in China.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 6, 1 (2005): 52-89.
—–. China’s Second World of Poetry: The Sichuan Avant-garde, 1982-1992. Leiden: Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS). Leiden University, 2005. [MCLC Resource Center review by Heather Inwood]
—–. “The Modern Poetry of China: Introduction.” Special Chinese poetry issue, The Drunken Boat. Ed. Inara Cedrins. (Spring/Summer 2006).
—–. “Online Avant-Garde Poetry in China Today.” In Christopher Lupke ed., New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 201-17.
Edmond, Jacob. A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature. NY: Fordham University Press, 2012. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jonathan Stalling]
[Abstract: Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions–East and West, local and global, common and strange–that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? In A Common Strangeness, Jacob Edmond exemplifies a new, multilingual and multilateral approach to literary and cultural studies. He begins with the entrance of China into multinational capitalism and the appearance of the Parisian flâneur in the writings of a Chinese poet exiled in Auckland, New Zealand. Moving among poetic examples in Russian, Chinese, and English, he then traces a series of encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, Edmond tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms.]
Emerson, Andrew G. “The Guizhou Undercurrent.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 2 (Fall 2001): 111-33.
Feeley, Jennifer. “Transforming Sylvia Plath through Contemporary Chinese Women’s Poetry.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, 1 (2017): 38-72.
[Abstract: The introduction and translation of Sylvia Plath’s (1932–63) poetry into Chinese in the 1980s had a significant impact on women’s poetry in contemporary China, particularly the work of Zhai Yongming (b. 1955) and Lu Yimin (b. 1962). Expanding on Lawrence Venuti’s theory of translation and intertextuality, this article explores the relationship between Chinese translations of Plath and the poetry of Zhai and Lu. It examines four sets of Plath translations and the accompanying paratextual commentaries, demonstrating how Plath’s Chinese translators inscribe their individual interpretations onto their translations. It shows how these texts are integral in shaping the early poetic output of Zhai and Lu, who further recontextualize Plath through their own poetry, revealing how Plath has been understood, evaluated, and transformed in contemporary China. Ultimately, this process results in a bold new gendered poetics that marks a turning point in Chinese women’s writing.]
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?]
Green, Frederik H. “Painted in Oil, Composed in Ink: Late-Qing Ekphrastic Poetry and the Encounter with Western-Style Painting.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 4 (Dec. 2015): 525-50.
Haft, Lloyd, ed. A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature, 1900-1949: The Poem. Leiden: Brill, 1989.
—–. “Terms for the Turning: Some Remarks on the Prose-Verse Dichotomy.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 3, 2 (Jan. 2000): 1-5.
—–. The Chinese Sonnet: Meanings of a Form. Leiden, CNWS Publications No. 69, 2000.
[Abstract: Discussing more than 50 poems spanning the period from the 1920s to the present, Haft develops analytic strategies which bring out the expressive dimensions of the Chinese sonnet as well as its legitimate claim to ‘Chineseness.’All poems are discussed in English translation as well as in the original Chinese; they include works by Zhu Xiang, Feng Zhi, Bian Zhilin, Zhang Cuo and Zheng Min]
Hockx, Michel. Snowy Morning: Eight Chinese Poets on the Road to Modernity. Leiden, 1994.
—–. “To Tong or Not to Tong: The Problem of Communication in Modern Chinese Poetics.” Monumenta Serica 53 (2005): 261-72.
—–. “Perverse Poems and Suspicious Salons: The Friday School in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, eds., Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon. NY: Routledge, 2009, 15-39.
Hsia, Yu, et al. “Cross it Out, Cross it Out, Cross it Out: Erasurist Poetry from Taiwan’s Poetry Now (Issue #9, Feb 2012).” Asymptote (April 2012).
Hsu, Kai-yu. “The Moon and the Beautiful Woman in Modern Chinese Poetry.” East-West Review 2, 3 (1966): 261-68.
—–. “Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Its Search for an Ideal Form.” In Bonnie McDougall, ed. Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the PRC, 1949-1979. Berkeley: UCP, 1984, 224-65.
Huang, Yunte. “Translation as Ethnography: Problems in American Translations of Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” In Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth Century American Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 164-182.
—–. “The Translator’s Invisible Hand: The Problems in the Introduction of Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” River City: A Journal of Contemporary Culture 16, 1 (1996): 68-81.
Huang, Yunte and Hangping Xu, eds. “Translatability and Transmediality: Chinese Poetry in/and the World,” special issue of Prism 20, 1 (2023).
Inwood, Heather. On the Scene of Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Ph. D. dissertation. London: SOAS, 2008. [poetry from mainland China from 2000-2008]
—–. “Between Licence and Responsibility: Reexamining the Role of the Poetry in Twenty-First-Century Chinese Society.” Chinese Literature Today (Winter/Spring 2011): 49-55.
—–. 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.
Inwood, Heather and Xiaofei Tian. “2006, September 30: Chinese Verse Going Viral: ‘Removing the Shackles of Poetry.'” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 895-900.
Jin, Siyan. La metamorphose des image poetiques des symbolistes franscais aux symbolistes chinois, 1915-1937. Dortmund: Projekt Verlag, 1996.
Jing, Lipeng and Guangming Wang. “Chinese Poetry in Review 2016.” Tr. Denis Mair. Chinese Literature Today 6, 2 (2017): 131-47.
Kaldis, Nicholas. The Chinese Prose Poem: A Study of Lu Xun’s Wild Grass. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014.
Kaplan, Harry. The Symbolist Movement in Modern Chinese Poetry. Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1983.
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
—–. The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness. Leiden: Brill, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Benjamin Ridgway]
[Abstract: What makes a Chinese poem “Chinese”? Some call modern Chinese poetry insufficiently Chinese, saying it is so influenced by foreign texts that it has lost the essence of Chinese culture as known in premodern poetry. Yet that argument overlooks how premodern regulated verse was itself created in imitation of foreign poetics. Looking at Bian Zhilin and Yang Lian in the twentieth century alongside medieval Chinese poets such as Wang Wei, Du Fu, and Li Shangyin,The Organization of Distance applies the notions of foreignization and nativization to Chinese poetry to argue that the impression of poetic Chineseness has long been a product of translation, from forces both abroad and in the past.]
—–. “What Does Tang Poetry Mean to Contemporary Chinese Writers?: Li Bai and the Canonicity of Tang Poetry in Liu Liduo, Ha Jin, Yi Sha, and Xi Chuan.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 18, 1 (2021): 138-69.
[Abstract: Examining how contemporary poets raised in China are looking at classical Chinese poetry from the Tang—in particular, the poetry and the figure of Li Bai 李白 (701–762)—this article questions the epistemological divide, common to scholarship, between premodern and modern Chinese poetry. The texts come from Shenqing shi 深情史 (Histories of Affection) by Liu Liduo 劉麗朵 (1979–); The Banished Immortal, Chinese-American poet and novelist Ha Jin’s 哈金 (1956–) biography of Li Bai; the book-length poem-sequence Tang 唐, by Yi Sha 伊沙 (1966–); and poet Xi Chuan’s 西川 (1963–) scholarly book Tang shi de dufa 唐詩的讀法 (Reading Tang Poetry). The author contends not only that these writers’ dealings with Tang poetry make it part of a still-living tradition but also that such engagement offers a way to understand the dynamic, rather than static, canonicity of Tang poetry.]
Korenaga, Shun. “The Growing Acceptance of Contemporary Chinese Poetry in Japan.” Acta Asiatica 72 (1997): 106-16.
Kowallis, Jon. “Melancholy in Late Qing and Early Republican Verse.” In Wolfgang Kubin, ed., Symbols of Anguish: In Search of Melancholy in China. Bern: Peter Lang, 2001, 289-314.
—–. The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the “Old Schools” during Late Qing and Early Republican China. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 2006.
——. “Collisions of the Past with the Present: Translation, Texts, and History.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 4 (Dec. 2015): 581-615.
Krenz, Joanna. “Ice Cream in the Cathedral: The Literary Failures and Social Success of Chinese Robot Poet Xiao Bing.” Asiatische Studien – Études Asiatiques 74, 3 (2020): 547-581.
—–. Living an Emperor’s Life, Dying a Nobel Death: Li Hongwei’s Novel The King and Lyric Poetry as a Journey through the History of Chinese Poetry.” Litteraria Copernicana 38 (2021-2): 57-82.
Ku, Tim-hung. “Modernism in Modern Poetry of Taiwan, ROC: A Comparative Perspective.” Tamkang Review 18 (1987/88): 125-39.
Kubin, Wolfgang. “The End of the Prophet: Chinese Poetry Between Modernity and Postmodernity.” In Larson et al eds., Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1993, 19-37.
—–. “Creator! Destroyer!–On the Self-Image of the Chinese Poet.” Modern Chinese Literature 9, 2 (1996): 247-60.
—–. “Stray Birds: Tagore and the Genesis of Modern Chinese Poetry.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 18, 1 (2009): 40-50.
—–. “The Language of Poetry, the Language of the World: World Poetry and World Language.” Chinese Literature Today (Winter/Spring 2011): 31-35.
—–. “Poetry as Express Mail: Toward the Situation of Poetry Today.” Chinese Literature Today 6, 2 (2017): 128-30.
Kwan-Terry, John. “Modernism and Tradition in Some Recent Chinese Verse.” Tamkang Review 3, 2 (1972): 189-202.
Kwong, Charles. “Reflections on a Century of Exploration: Whither Chinese Poetry?” In Jana S. Rošker and Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik, eds., Modernisation of Chinese Culture: Continuity and Change. Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013, 123-46.
Lam, Agnes. “Poetry in Hong Kong: The 1990s.” World Literature Today 73, 1 (1999): 53-62.
Lan, Dizhi. “The Origins and Historical Development of the Modernist Poets.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 21-37.
Larson, Wendy. “Contemporary Chinese Poetry: Erotics, Modernity, and Cultural Essence.” In Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang and Michelle Yeh, eds., Contemporary Chinese Literature: Crossing the Boundaries. Special issue of Literature East and West. Austin, TX: Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, 1995, 89-105.
—–. “Dangdai Zhongguo shige zhong de meigan yu seqing” 当代中国诗歌中的美感与色情 (Aesthetics and erotics in contemporary Chinese poetry). Tr. Zhang Zao. Jintian (Today) 3 (1992): 199-205.
Laureillard, Marie. “La poésie visuelle taiwanaise: un retour réflexif sur l’écriture.” Transtext(e)s Transculture: Journal of Global Cultural Studies 2 (Jan. 2007).
Lee, Gregory. “Contemporary Chinese Poetry and the Nobel Prize, 1990.” [a transcript of a tape-recording of a conversation between Göran Malmqvist and Gregory Lee which took place on 14th May 1990 in Stockholm]
—–. “Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Exile and the Potential for Modernism.” In Gregory Lee, ed., Chinese Writing and Exile. Chicago: Center for East Asian Studies, The University of Chicago, 1993, 55-78.
—–. La Chine et le spectre de l’Occident: Contestation poétique, modernité et métissage. Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2002.
—–. China’s Lost Decade: Cultural Politics and Poetics 1978-1990: In Place of History. Lyon: Editions Tigre de Papier, 2009. 2nd Edition. Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2012.
[Abstract: The period in China’s recent history between the death of Mao and the débâcle of 1989 can be seen as a long decade, but also historically as a “lost” decade. It is “lost” in the sense that the political engagement of intellectuals and makers of culture has been occulted by official history-telling; it is also “lost” in that its memory has been abandoned even by many who lived through it; “lost” also in the embarrassed silence of those who prefer to focus on the subsequent economic miracle of the 1990s that gave rise to today’s more prosperous China; and “lost” as a time of opportunity for cultural and political change that ultimately did not happen. The relevance of the “lost” decade to China’s living, if untold, history was once more made clear by the conferral of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize on Liu Xiaobo, a political activist since 1989, and by the awarding of the 2010 Neustadt literature prize to the poet Duoduo whose poetry and personal trajectory loom large in Lee’s book.]
Lee, Tong King. Experimental Chinese Literature: Translation, Technology, Poetics. Leiden: Brill, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jacob Edmond]
Leroux, Alain. “Poetry Movements in Taiwan from the 1950s to the late 1970s: Break and Continuities.” China Perspectives 68 (2007): 56-65.
Leung, Ping-kwan. Aesthetics of Opposition: A Study of the Modernist Generation of Chinese Poets, 1936-1949. Ph.d. diss. San Diego: University of California, SD, 1984.
—–. “Modern Hong Kong Poetry: Negotiations of Cultures and the Search for Identity.” Modern Chinese Literature 9, 2 (1996): 221-46.
Li, Dian. “Naming and Antinaming: Poetic Debate in Contemporary China.” In Christopher Lupke ed., New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 185-200.
—–. “The Classical Echo in Chinese Poetic Modernism.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 82-103.
Li, Fukang and Eva Hung. “Post-Misty Poetry.” Renditions 37 (1992): 93-98.
Li, Yun and Rong Rong. “A Middle-Class Misidentification: Self-Identification in the Autobiographical Poetry of Chinese Female Peasant Workers.” positions: asia critiques 27, 4 (Nov. 2019): 773-798.
Li, Xia. “Confucius, Playboys and Rusticated Glasperlenspieler: from Classical Chinese Poetry to Postmodernism.” Interlitterraria (Tartu, Estonia) 4 (1999): 41-60. (primarily on “misty” and “postmodern” poetry]
Liang, Yujing. The Making of Minjian: Yi Sha’s Poetics and Poetry Activities. PhD diss. Victoria University of Wellington, 2020.
Liao, Sebastien Hsien-hao. “From Poetic Revolution to Nation-(Re)building: Vicissitudes of Modernity in Modern Chinese Poetry.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 303-26.
Lin, Hsiang-lin. “Lyricism, the Veneration of Feeling, and Narrative Technique in the Poetry Talks of the Southern Society.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12, 2 (2018): 324-50.
[Abstract: This paper examines the voluminous “poetry talks” (shihua) written by Southern Society (Nanshe) members and focuses on two tendencies in these discourses: The general cult of sentimentality and the narrative strategy on women’s poetry. These poetic discourses succeeded the language of traditional literary criticism, but also exhibited ideals of the new epoch. As a rebellion to the Qing imperial standard on measured and learned poetry, Southern Society poets took instead as their role models eccentric and iconoclastic poets who “venerated feelings.” The cult of sentimentality continued the trend of individual liberation from the late Ming and further showed a collective discourse that promoted a new kind of revolutionary subjectivity. These authors were also fond of collecting sentimental stories about female poets. More than being traditional “talented women,” these poets exhibited a diversity of female roles in an era of liberation.]
Lin, Julia C. Modern Chinese Poetry: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972.
—–. Essays on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Athens: Ohio UP, 1985.
Linder, Birgit Bunzel. “Metaphors unto Themselves: Mental Illness Poetics and Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” In Howard Y. F. Choy, ed., Discourses of Disease: Writing Illness, the Mind and Body in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2016, 90-120.
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, David Jason. “Chinese Symbolist Verse in the 1920s: Li Chin-fa and Mu Mu-t’ien.” Tamkang Review 12, 1 (1981): 27-53.
Liu, Joyce Chi-hui. “Palace Museum vs. the Surrealist Collage: Two Modes of Construction in Modern Taiwanese Ekphrasis Poetry.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24, 4 (1997): 933-46.
Lo, Kwai-cheung. “Writing the Otherness of Nature: Chinese Misty Poetry and the Alternative Modernist Practice.” Tamkang Review 29, 2 (1998): 87-117.
Loi, Michelle. Poetes chinois d’ecoles francaises. Paris: Librairie d’Amerique et d’Orient Adrien Maisonneuve, 1980.
Lovell, Julia. “Misty in Roots: Chinese Poetry after Mao.” Poetry Review 26, 3 (Aut. 2002).
Lupke, Christopher, ed. New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Maghiel van Crevel]
—–. “National Myth and Global Aesthetics: Reading Yeats alongside Chinese Poetic Modernism.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 209-34.
Malmqvist, Goran. “On the Emergence of Modernistic Poetry in China.” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 55 (1983): 57-71.
—–. “On the Develpment of Modern Taiwanese Poetry.” Archiv Orientalni 67, 3 (1999): 311-22.
Manfredi, Paul. “Great Expectations: Self, Form, and the First Modern Chinese Poem.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 2 (Fall 2001): 1-29.
—–. “Writing the Influenced Text: Modern Chinese Symbolist Poetry.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 5, 2 (2002): 1-28.
—–. Modern Poetry in China: A Verbal-Visual Dynamic. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Maghiel van Crevel]
[Abstract: Chinese poetry, along with many other art forms in China, underwent a highly self-conscious transformation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Poetry, perhaps more than any other art form, did so under the heavy burden of a voluminous literary precedent, a precedent which was in its very format of patterned words inscribed on scrolls–a mark of the Chinese literati tradition. Turning away from this tradition seemed necessary in the context of a political, social, and cultural reform movement. . . At the same time, reforming a poetic tradition which had served as a principal touchstone of aesthetic accomplishment . . . was a major challenge. The result of such a predicament for poets throughout the twentieth century has been the compulsion to discover a poetic style which resonates with the modern world and yet is rooted in Chinese cultural experience. One way in which poets have been able to accomplish this is by relying on poetry’s visuality, be it in the graphic properties of the writing system itself, the visual context of the presentation of the poetic texts, or the acute image details in the poems. The history of approximately one century of modern Chinese poetry production has been addressed broadly in scholarship, but such broad strokes tend to miss important dynamics which fall outside of general narratives. The importance of Chinese visual tradition to modern Chinese poets is a good case in point. Accordingly, this book addresses specific manifestations of the nexus connecting modernity and visuality in Chinese poetry. It begins with a discussion of May Fourth poetics as exemplified in the groundbreaking work of Li Jinfa, China’s first “Symbolist” poet. From there the book traces notable developments of visuality in the new form or free verse writing (called Xinshi or “New Poetry”) through mid-century modernist experiments in Taiwan (focusing on Ji Xian). From there the book then explores the avant-garde poetry of Luo Qing and Xia Yu before returning to mainland Chinese developments of Misty poets Yan Li and his contemporaries. The work concludes with a wide variety of poet-artists writing and exhibiting in the twenty-first century. Looking across this period of modern Chinese poetry’s development, one is able to observe how important the visual-verbal dynamic has been to the innovation of poetic style and method. . .]
—–. “Modernist Literati: Abstract Art of Contemporary Chinese Poets.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 336-64.
Manfredi, Paul and Christopher Lupke, eds. Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Joanna Krenz]
[Abstract: This volume of fourteen essays explores Chinese poetic modernism in all its facets, from its origins in the 1920s through 21st century manifestations. Modernisms in the plural reflects the complexity of the ideas and forms which can be associated with this literary-historical term. The volume’s contributors take a variety of focus points, from literary groups such as “9 Leaves” or “Bamboo Hat,” to individuals such as modernist sonneteer Feng Zhi 冯至, or Taiwan experimentalist Xia Yu 夏宇 (Hsia Yü), and Hong Kong modernist Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉钧, to non-biographically oriented chapters concerning modernist language, poetry and visual art, among other issues. Collectively, the volume endeavors to present as complete a picture of modernist practice in Chinese poetry as possible.]
Marijnissen, Silvia. “‘Made Things’: Serial Form in Modern Poetry from Taiwan.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 2 (Fall 2001): 172-206.
McDougall, Bonnie. “Poems, Poets, and Poetry 1976: An Exercise in the Typology of Modern Chinese Literature.” Contemporary China 2, 4 (Winter 1978).
Meng, Liansu. The Inferno Tango: Gender Politics and Modern Chinese Poetry, 1917-1980. Ph.d. diss. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2010. [see Dissertation Reviews review by Dun Wang]
Mi, Jiayan. Self-Fashioning and Reflexive Modernity in Modern Chinese Poetry. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2004. [MCLC Resource Center review by Paul Manfredi]
[Abstract: This study explores diverse modes of self-fashioning in the discursive formation of Chinese modernity between 1919 and 1949 in modern Chinese poetry. By focusing on four representative poets of modern Chinese poetry before 1949—Guo Moruo, Li Jinfa, Dai Wangshu, and Mu Dan, the study offers fresh, insightful analysis of the dynamic trajectory of the historical complexity of fashioning a new modern self-subjectivity with relation to the nation-state. Theoretically informed by the varied perspectives of modernity, the self, the body, and memory, the author for the first time reveals how the corporeal body emerges as a site of agency, trauma, and libidinal investment for engaging with the configuration of a multi-layered self, gender, and nationhood in modern China. This work will make several significant contributions to enhancing readers’ understanding of the cultural and psychological complexity of modern China. This work will be of interest to teachers, students and scholars of modern Chinese literature and culture as well as comparative literature.]
Owen, Stephen. “The Anxiety of Influence: What is Modern Poetry?” New Republic (Nov. 1990): 28-32.
Palandri, Angela Jung. “The Polemics of Post-Mao Poetry: Controversy over Meng-lung shih.” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 19, 3 (1984): 67-86.
Parry, Amie Elizabeth. Interventions into Modernist Cultures: Poetry from Beyond the Empty Screen. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Paul Manfredi]
[Abstract: A comparative analysis of the cultural politics of modernist writing in the United States and Taiwan. Parry argues that the two sites of modernism are linked by their representation or suppression of histories of U.S. imperialist expansion, Cold War neocolonial military presence, and economic influence in Asia. Focusing on poetry, a genre often overlooked in postcolonial theory, she contends that the radically fragmented form of modernist poetic texts is particularly well suited to representing U.S. imperialism and neocolonial modernities.]
Peschel, Sabine. “Chinese Hermetic Lyric Poetry.” In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 69-71.
Picerni, Federico. “‘Poets, What Can We Do?’ Pandemic Poetry in China’s Mobilization against Covid-19.” Azijske Študije / Asian Studies 10, 1 (2022): 123–153.
Ruan, Meihui. “Li and Modernism: The Development of a Poetry Journal.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 153-77.
Saussy, Haun. “Ways of Reading Worlds in Chinese Poetry.” Prism 20, 1 (2023): 10-25.
[Abstract: Readers of Chinese poetry in English translation have long been accustomed to seeing Wang Wei’s quatrain “Lu zhai” as a microcosm of the Chinese poetic tradition. Thematically, it is also a world in miniature, including an “empty mountain,” “human voices,” and “returning shadows” at the end of day. And the historical series of its English translations offers a picture of ever more condensed and stripped-down utterance, as if straining at the borders of the sayable in the effort to display an exotic worldview. But the quatrain, famous though it is in isolation, is but one in a series of forty, a moment in a dialogue that also includes scroll painting and landscape architecture. Putting the quatrain in its expanded context affords it a greater comparability with the rolling, episodic, adventuresome structure of Gary Snyder’s homage to Chinese landscape painting, Mountains and Rivers without End. When dealing with worlds in art, it is important to ask what kind of world, and whether this world is self-sufficient or is part of another world, which may be part of further worlds.]
Schmidt, Jerry D. “The Field of Modern Lyric Classicism.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 4 (Dec. 2015): 515-24.
Schwartz, Leonard. “Contemporary Chinese Poetry and the Experience of the Sacred: Three Chinese Poets.” Journal of Chinese Religions 23 (1996): 95-104.
Shigebao.com [website of the Poetry Gazette journal; very informative site for contemporary PRC poetry; Chinese only]
Skerratt, Brian. “Born Orphans of the Earth: Pastoral Utopia in Contemporary Taiwanese Poetry.” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 4, 1 (2021): 101-20.
[Abstract: In 2011, amid a string of controversies in the Taiwanese countryside surrounding industrial pollution, urban expansion, the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, and the destruction of the natural and rural environments, poet and editor Hong Hong announced ‘the last pastoral poem’, suggesting that the representation of the countryside as bucolic landscape was an out-of-date and politically impotent trope. This paper argues, contrary to Hong Hong’s polemic, that depictions of pastoral utopia remain a vital and powerful alternative to the forces of urbanisation and industrialisation in Taiwan and the larger Sinophone world. The paper analyses poetry by contemporary poet Ling Yu against the background of the tradition of utopian pastoral writing represented by the book of Genesis, Virgil, Laozi, Tao Yuanming, and Gary Snyder. The paper argues for a poetics that symbolically mediates between nature and culture, and building and dwelling, by means of slow ‘cultivation’, in both the agricultural and aesthetic senses. The paper further draws on transnational Hong Kong poet Liu Wai Tong’s concept of ‘you-topia’ to suggest a means of reconciling Chinese tradition and contemporary ecocritical discourse.]
Song, Chris. “Poetry in Crisis: Its Writing and Circulation during the Pandemic in China.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 1/2 (2022): 100-106.
[Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese poetry has been misread, appropriated, and run down with various cultural purposes and/or ideological agendas just like in any historical period, and its circulation does not always meet with open arms. On February 12, 2020, Changjiang Daily published Xiao Chang’s controversial critical commentary entitled, “Rather than ‘Mountains and Rivers under the Same Sky,’ I Would Like to Hear ‘Wuhan, Add Oil!,’” (“Xiangbi ‘Fengyue tongtian,’ wo geng xiang tingdao ‘Wuhan jiayou!’”) targeting two lines from Prince Nagaya’s Sinitic poem “Occasion of the Embroidered Robes” (“Xiu jiashayi yuan”). This essay revisits the history of this poem and the circulation of this poem during the epidemic in Wuhan. By contrasting Xiao Chang’s implication that poetry was inopportune, obscure, and barbaric, this essay argues that his article, as a voice from the authority, was intended to impose constraint on poetry writing, which further reveals a crisis for the poetry writing in China today.]
Song, Xianlin. “Post-Mao New Poetry and ‘Occidentalism.'” East Asia 18, 1 (Spring 2000): 61-81.
Stalling, Jonathan. “Chinese Poetry from Center to Periphery: A Conversation with Michelle Yeh.” Chinese Literature Today (Winter/Spring 2011): 95-100.
Su Wei and Wendy Larson. “The Disintegration of the Poetic ‘Berlin Wall.'” In Deborah Davis, et. al, eds. Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995, 279-95.
Sun, Zhimei. “From Poetic Revolution to the Southern Society: The Birth of Classicist Poetry in Modern China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12, 2 (2018): 299-323.
[Abstract: This paper examines the birth of classicist poetry by paying attention to the Southern Society’s (Nanshe) diachronic succession of the late Qing Poetic Revolution. It provides a careful analysis on the novelty of Huang Zunxian’s poetry and shows how the Southern Society transformed Huang’s Europeanized innovation into something that was rooted in both traditional scholarship and modern political discourse. I argue that the poetry of the Southern Society as being more formally conservative than Huang’s; however, spiritually, it represents a kind of progress as it styled itself as the “poetry of the cotton-clothed” (buyi zhi shi)—the “cotton- clothed” stands for the scholars not serving in court. In this regard, its poetry could be seen as modern in spirit. It selectively integrated the traditional and the Western, for pragmatic and utilitarian purposes.]
Tan, Chee Lay. “An Attempt to Read Mistiness: Examining the Imagery of Chinese Misty Poetry from an Eastern-Western Comparative Perspective.” Korean Journal of Chinese Linguistics and Literature 58 (2014): 105-28.
Tan, Chung. “Tagore’s Inspiration in China’s New Poetry.” In Tan Chung, ed., Across the Himalayan Gap: An Indian Quest for Understanding China. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1998.
Tang, Xiaobing. “Poetic Revolution: Colonialization and Form at the Beginning of Modern Chinese Literature.” In Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change om Late Qing China. Cambridge: Havard UP, 2002, 245-65.
Tao, Naikan. “Going Beyond: Post-Menglong Poets.” The Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 27/28 (1995/96): 146-53.
Tian, Xiaofei. “Muffled Dialect Spoken by Green Fruit: An Alternative History of Modern Chinese Poetry.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 1 (Spring 2009): 1-45.
Tong, Q. S. “William Empson, W. H. Auden, and Modernist Poetry in Wartime China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 449-55.
Tso, Sarah Yihsuan. “My Body, My Poetry”: Ai-lin Yen’s and Taiwanese Women Poets’ Poetics of the Body.” The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 9, 1 (Dec. 2015): 29-59.
[Abstract: With the tenet of “my body, my poetry,” this paper argues that poetry written by women claims the right to articulate the female body and champions the validity of their poems about the female body. Rather than being denominated in literary history as an alternative school of carnality, women’s poetry about the body should be judged by its aesthetic value. A pioneer among Taiwanese women poets on the subject of the body, Ai-lin Yen in Bone, Skin, and Flesh (1997) advances a personal feminism which is frank and honest about female desire as well as the female body, and about the exploitation of the female body. Yen’s poems expand on the motility and stases of the drives and abjection, and sketch what Elaine Showalter calls a “double-voiced discourse” in dialectical relationships with both male and female traditions.]
Tsou, Zona Yi-ping. “An Interview with John Crespi on Performance Poetry in China, with a Sampling of Live Recordings.” Fult Tilt 2 (Summer 2007).
Twitchell, Jeffrey and Huang Fan. “Avant-Garde Poetry in China: The Nanjing Scene 1981-1992.” World Literature Today 71,1 (1997): 29-35.
Unofficial Poetry Journals from China: Publishing outside the System in Post-Mao China [Leiden University Libraries Digital Collections)
[Abstract: Unofficial or “underground” poetry publications—especially journals, but also one-off multiple-author anthologies and individual collections—play an important role in contemporary Chinese culture. They are comparable to Soviet-Russian samizdat publications, and to the “little magazines” often associated with early modernism in the West. The Leiden University collection is internationally unique. It was built by Maghiel van Crevel, who donated it to the library in 2006 and has continued to add new acquisitions. The help of Chinese poets and scholars has been invaluable throughout. The journals are hugely influential but difficult to access. In order to address this paradox and to advance research, teaching, translation, and use by the general reader, Leiden University Libraries is working to digitize the collection, in collaboration with the Fudan University Library. A first set of key items was digitized with the generous support of Freerk Heule. For some quick tips on using the collection, watch this video.]
van Crevel, Maghiel. “Underground Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s.” Modern Chinese Literature 9, 2 (1996): 169-220.
—–. Language Shattered: Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Duoduo. Leiden: CNWS Research School, 1996. [the first half of the book is a general overview of the poetry of the PRC]
—–. “The Horror of Being Ignored and the Pleasure of Being Left Alone: Notes on the Chinese Poetry Scene.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (April 2003).
—–. “Who Needs Form? Wen Yiduo’s Poetics and Post-Mao Poetry.” In Peter Hoffmann, ed, Poet, Scholar, Patriot: In Honour of Wen Yiduo’s 100th Anniversary. Bochum / Freiburg: Projektverlag, 2004, 81-110.
—–. “Not Quite Karaoke: Poetry in Contemporary China.” The China Quarterly 183 (Sept. 2005): 644-669.
—–. “Unofficial Poetry Journals from the People’s Republic of China: A Research Note and an Annotated Bibliography.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (February 2007).
—–. “Avant-garde Poetry from the People’s Republic of China: A Bibliography of Single-Author and Multiple-Author Collections.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (September 2008).
—–. “Avant-Garde Poetry from the People’s Republic of China: A Bibliography of Scholarly and Critical Books in Chinese.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (September 2008).
—–. Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money. Leiden: Brill, 2008. (open access through Brill website] [MCLC Resource Center review by Christopher Lupke] [Supplement to Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money: Citations in Chinese, compiled by van Crevel and Wu Jinhua, published by MCLC Resource Center]
[Abstract: a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship, well-suited to classroom use in that it combines rigorous analysis with a lively style. Covering the period from the 1980s to the present, it is organized around the notions of text, context and metatext, meaning poetry, its socio-political and cultural surroundings, and critical discourse in the broadest sense. Authors and issues studied include Han Dong, Haizi, Xi Chuan, Yu Jian, Sun Wenbo, Yang Lian, Wang Jiaxin, Bei Dao, Yin Lichuan, Shen Haobo and Yan Jun, and everything from the subtleties of poetic rhythm to exile-bashing in domestic media. This book has room for all that poetry is: cultural heritage, symbolic capital, intellectual endeavor, social commentary, emotional expression, music and the materiality of language – art, in a word.]
—–. “What Was All the Fuss About? The Popular-Intellectual Polemic.” In van Crevel, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money, Leiden: Brill, 2008: 399-458.
—–. “Lower Body Poetry and Its Lineages: Disbelief, Bad Behavior and Social Concern.” In Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 179-206.
—–. “Taking Sides with Poetry: An Homage to Michelle Yeh. ” Chinese Literature Today (Winter/Spring 2011): 86-89.
—–. “Avant-Garde Poetry in China Since the 1980s.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 414-21.
—–. “From China with Love: Unofficial Poetry Journals in the Leiden University Library.” In Saskia van Bergen et al., eds, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis (Yearbook of book history in the Netherlands] vol 24. Nijmegen & Leiden: Vantilt & Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging, 2017, 233-249 [this abridged edition of “Unofficial Poetry Journals from the People’s Republic of China: A Research Note and an Annotated Bibliography,” updated to include recent trends and examples, is available through open access here: https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/66006]
—–. “Walk on the Wild Side: Snapshots of the Chinese Poetry Scene.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (Dec. 2017).
—–. “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.]
—–. “Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry.” Chinese Literature Today 8, 1 (2019): 127-45.
[Abstract: This essay offers some impressions of a grassroots literature group and the multifaceted nongovernmental organization of which it is a part: the Migrant Workers Home based in Picun, in the suburbs of Beijing. In migrant worker literature the subaltern definitely speaks—and this is also true for the museum of migrant worker culture that is part of the Migrant Workers Home. After comparing this museum with government-run migrant worker museums in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the essay returns to the Picun literature group and highlights the question of translatability in foreign scholarship’s engagement with China’s migrant worker poetry.]
—–. “From China with Love: Unofficial Poetry Journals in the Leiden University Library.” Web lecture (Dec. 10, 2019).
—–. “Transgression as Rule: Freebooters in Chinese Poetry.” In Paul Kroll and Jonathan Silk, eds., “At the Shores of the Sky”: Asian Studies for Albert Hoffstädt. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 262-279.
—–. “No One in Control? China’s Battler Poetry.” Comparative Critical Studies 18 (2-3): 165-185.
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]
van Crevel, Maghiel and Wu Jinhua, compilers. “Supplement to Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money: Citations in Chinese.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (January 2017).
Vuilleumier, Victor. “Body, Soul, and Revolution: The Paradoxical Transfiguration of the Body in Modern Chinese Poetry.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Rosemary Roberts, and Yang Ling, eds. Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009, 45-70.
Wang, I-chun. “Refashioning Identity in Taiwan Vernacular Poetry.” 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, 122-37.
Weinberger, Eliot. “A Few Don’ts for Chinese Poets.” In Weinberger, Works on Paper. NY: New Directions, 1986, 70-76.
Wong, Lisa Lai-ming. “Voices from a Room of One’s Own: Examples of Contemporary Chinese Women’s Poetry.” Modern China 32, 3 (2006): 385-408.
[Abstract: Contemporary critics who study women’s literature often focus on the very act of speaking, or the possession of a voice. The speaker in a poem seems to lend the women of her time a voice to express their feelings and in so doing offers a female perspective on social and cultural aspects of life. Adopting ideas from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as well as Hélène Cixous’s notion of “writing the body, ” this article explores how women poets find a private space in their own rooms for examining “liberated” selves. A new conception of body and space is presented in these lyric voices. In contrast, in the voices of many critics, we hear a glaring double standard that exposes the persistence of patriarchal inhibition of women’s freedom of expression. This dialogic tension between the voices reveals women’s predicaments and their strong protests against the status quo in contemporary China.]
—–. “Liberation or Femininity? Women’s Poetry in Post-Mao China.” 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, 2009, 91-108.
—–. “Measure Words Not for Measure: A Linguistic Experiment in Modern Chinese Poetry.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 235-57.
Wong, Yoon Wah. “The ‘New Tide’ That Came from America.” In Wong, Essays on Chinese Literature. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1988, 28-39.
—–. “The ‘New Tide’ That Came from America.” In Wong, Essays on Chinese Literature. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1988, 39-51.
Wu, Shengqing. “Contested Fengya: Classical-Style Poetry Clubs in Early Republican China.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 15-46.
—–. Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900-1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jon Eugene von Kowallis]
[Abstract: After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the rise of a vernacular language movement, most scholars and writers declared the classical Chinese poetic tradition to be dead. But how could a longstanding high poetic form simply grind to a halt, even in the face of tumultuous social change? In this groundbreaking book, Wu explores the transformation of Chinese classical-style poetry in the early twentieth century. Drawing on extensive archival research into the poetry collections and literary journals of two generations of poets and critics, Wu discusses the continuing significance of the classical form with its densely allusive and intricately wrought style. She combines close readings of poems with a depiction of the cultural practices their authors participated in, including poetry gatherings, the use of mass media, international travel, and translation, to show how the lyrical tradition was a dynamic force fully capable of engaging with modernity. By examining the works and activities of previously neglected poets who maintained their commitment to traditional aesthetic ideals, Modern Archaics illuminates the splendor of Chinese lyricism and highlights the mutually transformative power of the modern and the archaic.]
—–. “A Paper Mirror: Autobiographical Moments in Modern Chinese Poetry.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 3, 2 (Nov. 2016): 312-34.
[Abstract: Through the examination of a select body of classical-style poems that are inscribed on or written about photographs of the self in the modern era, this article delves into the intertwined issues of the self, affect, and autobiographical writing. It first explores the ethical implications of “poems on photographs of the self” (ziti xiaozhao 自題小照) and the issue of temporality involved in the confrontation with a self-image and subsequent writing about the image. Second, it focuses on the issue of the self as other, as well as fractures and the instability of modern subjectivity as amplified in visual self-encounters. In so doing, the article attempts to offer a new understanding of the self/image and text/image dynamic, with insight into the cultural and affective articulations of the self in the context of a new visual culture in modern China.]
—–. Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture. NY: Columbia University Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jiangtao Gu]
[Abstract: Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world? Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.]
Xia, Xiaoyu. “The Necessity of Rhyme: Wen Yiduo, Bian Zhilin, and Modern Chinese Prosody.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Article, Reviews 45 (2023): 139-58.
Xie, Mian. “One Hundred Years of New Chinese Poetry.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 2, 4 (Dec. 2008): 617-46.
Yan, Li. “Modern Chinese Lyric Poetry.” In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 72-73.
Yang, Haihong. Women’s Poetry and Poetics in Late Imperial China: A Dialogic Engagement. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.
[Abstract: This literary study examines women-authored poetry and poetic criticism in late imperial China. It provides close readings of original texts to explore the poetic forms and devices women poets employed, to place their work into the context of the wider literary history of the period, and to analyze how they asserted their own agency to negotiate their literary, social, and political concerns. The author also investigates the interactions between women’s poetic creations and existing male scholars’ discourses and probes how these interactions generated innovative self-identities and renovations in poetic forms and aesthetics.]
Yang, Haosheng. A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune: Classical-Style Poetry of Modern Chinese Writers. Leiden: Brill, 2016. [MCLC Resource Center review by Brian Skerratt]
Yang, Vincent. “From French Symbolism to Chinese Symbolism: A Literary Influence.” Tamkang Review 17, 3 (1987): 221-44.
Yang, Xiaobin. “Transcultural Translation/Transference in Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (Fall 2009): 42-85.
Yang, Zhiyi. “Classical Poetry in Modern Politics: Liu Yazi’s PR Campaign for Mao Zedong.” Asian and African Studies [Bratislava] 22, 2 (2013): 208-26.
—–. “The Modernity of the Ancient-Style Verse.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 4 (Dec. 2015): 551-80.
—–, ed. “Modern Chinese Lyric Classicism.” Special Issue of Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 4 (Dec. 2015).
—– 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.]
Ye, Rong. “From Obscure Poets to the Sacrificed Lamb of the Kingdom of Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 14, 1 (2005): 56-65.
Yeh, Michelle. “Taoism and Modern Chinese Poetry.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 15 (1988): 173-97.
—–. Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice since 1917. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.
—– [奚密]. “Chayi de youlv: yige huixiang” 差异的忧虑：一个回响 (The anxiety of difference: a rejoinder). Jintian 1 (1991): 94-96.
—–. “Light a Lamp in a Rock: Experimental Poetry in Contemporary China.” Modern China 18, 4 (1992): 379-409.
—–. “The ‘Cult of Poetry’ in Contemporary China.” Journal of Asian Studies 55, 1 (1996): 51-80. Rpt. in Yingjin Zhang, ed., China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999, 188-217.
—–. “Nature’s Child and the Frustrated Urbanite: Expressions of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” World Literature Today (Summer 1991): 405-09.
—–. “Death of the Poet: Poetry and Society in Contemporary China and Taiwan.” In Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang and Michelle Yeh, eds., Contemporary Chinese Literature: Crossing the Boundaries. Special issue ofLiterature East and West. Austin, TX: Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, 1995, 43-62. Rpt. in Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 216-38.
—–. “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.
—–. “From Surrealism to Nature Poetics: A Study of Prose Poetry from Taiwan.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 3, 2 (Jan. 2000): 117-56.
—–. “Modern Poetry.” In Victor H. Mair, ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2001, 453-65.
—–. “A New Orientation to Poetry: the Transition from Traditional to Modern Chinese Poetry in the May Fourth Era.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 93-100.
—–. “Modern Poetry of Taiwan.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 561-69. Rpt in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 327-35.
—–. “Misty Poetry.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 520-26. Rpt in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 286-92.
—–, ed. Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese (special issue on modern poetry) 6, 1 (Jan. 2005).
—–. “‘There Are No Camels in the Koran’: What Is Modern about Modern Chinese Poetry?” In Christopher Lupke ed., New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007: 9-27.
—–. “Game-Changers: A Prolegomenon to a Theory of Modern Chinese Poetry.” Chinese Literature Today (Winter/Spring 2011): 90-94.
—–. “Modern Chinese Poetry: Translation and Translatability.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 5, 4 (2011): 600-609.
—–. “The Russian Imaginary and Modern Chinese Poetry in Taiwan.” Prism 20, 1 (2023): 117-38.
[Abstract: Russia in Taiwanese literature is a topic that has received little scholarly attention. Although Russian literature in translation has been available in Taiwan since the Japanese Occupation period, the selections and receptions contrast sharply from those in mainland China due to geopolitical reasons. This article begins with an overview of the introduction of Russian literature into Taiwan in the twentieth century. Then it focuses on the Russian imaginary in modern Chinese poetry in Taiwan as represented by two major poets: Ya Xian and Yang Mu. Rather than an influence study, this article is an exploration of the multiple ways in which Russia functions semantically, structurally, and sonically in the poems.]
Yip, Wai-lim. “Crisis Poetry: An Introduction to Yang Lian, Jiang He and Misty Poetry.” Renditions 23 (1985): 120-30.
—–. Lyrics from Shelters: Modern Chinese Poetry, 1930-1950. NY: Garland, 1992.
Yu, Guangzhong (Yu Kwang-chung). “Chinese Poetry in Taiwan.” The Chinese Pen (Autumn, 1972): 42-65.
Yu, Shiao-ling. “Voice of Protest: Political Poetry in the Post-Mao Era.” China Quarterly 96 (Dec. 1983): 703-20.
Zhang, Jeanne Hong. The Invention of a Discourse: Women’s Poetry from Contemporary China. Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2004. [MCLC Resource Center review by Paul Manfredi]
—–. “A Night of Their Own: Gender Identity in Women’s Poetry after Mao.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 6, 1 (2005): 90-118.
Zhang, Songjian. “Lyricism and Its Discontent: Exploring Three Dimensions of Modern Chinese Poetics.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 20, 1 (2011): 1-22.
Zhang, Xiaohong. “The Personal is Political: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Chinese and American Confessional Poetry.” Comparative Literature Studies 54, 1 (2017): 31-51.
Zhang, Xiaohong, and Jiazhao Lin. “Between Modern and Postmodern: Contemporary Chinese Poetry from the Outside In.” Journal of Modern Literature 44, 2 (2021): 34–48.
Zhang, Zao. “Development and Continuity of Modernism in Chinese Poetry Since 1917.” In Larson and Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds. Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1993, 38-59.
Zhang, Ziqing. “The New Zen Poetry in China.” Talisman 13 (1994/95): 154-158.
Zhu, Yanhong. “Dramatic Synthesis: Time, Memory, and History in the Writings of the Nine Leaves Poets.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 57-81.
Drama/Performance
Amitin, Mark. “Chinese Theatre Today: Beyond the Great Wall.” Performing Arts Journal 4, 3 (1980): 9-26.
Bai, Di. “Feminism in the Revolutionary Model Ballets The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women.” In Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010, 188-202.
Bibliography of the Performing Arts in Asia–China section [Compiled by Alex Hadary; Theatre, dance, puppetry, cinema, plays, masks, martial arts. (Music when connected with dance or theatre]
Bohnenkamp, Max L. “Neither Western Opera, Nor Old Chinese Theater: The Modernist ‘Integrated Art-Form’ and the Origins of the Maoist ‘New Music-Drama.'” In Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 34-60.
Braester, Yomi. “The Purloined Lantern: Maoist Semiotics and Public Discourse in Early PRC Film and Drama.” In Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003, 106-27.
Budde, Antje. “The Theatre in China.” In In Jochen Noth et.al., eds., China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 74-75.
Chabrowski, Igor Iwo. “Reforming the State and Constructing Commercial Opera in Sichuan, 1902–1920s: An Entangled History of Performing Arts and Administrative Reforms.” Modern China 44, 5 (2018).
[Abstract: This article analyzes the thorough reformulation of opera in Sichuan in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It argues that theater developed in Sichuan during the eighteenth century as a part of the social and religious life of market towns and cities and that it was indivisibly connected with the political and administrative structure of the country. As such, it was fragmented along musical, dialectic, and geographic lines. The introduction of the New Policies in 1905, which most affected the largest urban centers such as Chengdu and Chongqing, was the main cause of organizational reconstruction of theatrical performances. They changed both opera’s place in social life and the way it was produced and staged. Within the new legal framework, opera was placed under the Company Law and therefore moved from the sphere of festivity to that of business, while playhouses’ prosperity was bound with the police departments that taxed and protected them. The mutual dependence of law enforcement and entertainment persisted during the early Republic and was revived in the 1930s, making theaters among the most stable and important institutions of early twentieth-century Sichuan cities. The Sichuan opera we know now is a product of this historical process. The study of the institutional development of opera shows the aims, scope, and limitations of the political reforms that reshaped China in the late Qing and Republican periods.]
—–. Ruling the Stage: Social and Cultural History of Opera in Sichuan from the Qing to the People’s Republic of China. Leiden: Brill, 2022.
[Abstract: Through an innovative interdisciplinary reading and field research, Igor Chabrowski analyses the history of the development of opera in Sichuan, arguing that opera serves as a microcosm of the profound transformation of modern Chinese culture between the 18th century and 1950s. He investigates the complex path of opera over this course of history: exiting the temple festivals, becoming a public obsession on commercial stages, and finally being harnessed to partisan propaganda work. The book analyzes the process of cross-regional integration of Chinese culture and the emergence of the national opera genre. Moreover, opera is shown as an example of the culture wars that raged inside China’s popular culture.]
Chan, Shelby Kar Yan and Gilbert C. F. Fong. “Hongkong-Speak: Cantonese and Rupert Chan’s Translated Theater.” In Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 172-92.
Chang, Shuei-may. Casting off the Shackles of Family: Ibsen’s Nora Figure in Modern Chinese Literature, 1918–1942. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.
[Abstract: Nora, a character from Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll House, was a model for liberal-thinking Chinese women during the May Fourth Era of the 1920s and 1930s. Nora-like figures appeared often in modern Chinese literature to illustrate the issue of women’s emancipation. Casting Off the Shackles of Family explores the reception and transformation of the Nora theme in the works of Lu Hsün, Mao Tun, Ting Ling, and other May Fourth writers. In particular, it uses female heroic journey theories to trace women’s pursuit of independence and freedom in modern China.]
Chen Baichen 陈白尘 and Dong Jian 董健. Zhongguo xiandai xiju shigao 中国现代戏剧史稿 (The history of modern Chinese drama). Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1989.
Chen, Jide. “Subaltern Writing in Twenty-First-Century Chinese Avant-Gard Theater.” Tr. Nienyuan Cheng. Chinese Literature Today 8, 2 (2019): 52-57.
Chen, Xiaomei. “Fathers and Daughters in Early Modern Chinese Drama–On the Problematics of Feminist Discourse in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” Papers in Comparative Studies. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 1992, 205-22. Rpt. in Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China. NY: Oxford UP, 1995, 137-67.
—–. “Women as Dramatic Other in the Body Politics of Post-Mao Theater.” In D. Kaminski, et.al, eds. China’s Perception of Peace, War, and the World. Wien: Ludwig Bolzmann Institut fur China, 1997, 160-67.
—–. “A Stage of Their Own: Feminism, Countervoices, and the Problematics of Women’s Theater.” Journal of Asian Studies 56, 1 (1997): 3-25.
—-. “Feminism, Countervoices, and the Utterance of Women as Dramatic Other in Post-Mao Theater.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 29, 1 (Winter 1997): 819-28.
—–. “Audience, Applause, and Countertheater: Border Crossing in ‘Social Problem’ Plays in Post-Mao China.” New Literary History 29 (1998): 101-20.
—–. “Modern Stage in Search of a Tradition: The Dynamics of Form and Content in 1990s Chinese Theater.” Asian Theater Journal 18, 2 (2001): 200-21.
—–. “Modern Chinese Spoken Drama.” The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. Ed. Victor H. Mair. NY: Columbia UP, 2001, 848-77.
—–. “The Making of a Revolutionary Stage: Chinese Model Theater and Western Influences.” In Claire Sponsler and Xiaomei Chen, eds., East of West: Cross-cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference.NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2001, 125-40.
—– Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ruru Li]
—-. “Operatic Revolutions: Tradition, Memory, and Women in Model Theater.” In Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 73-158.
—–. “Family, Village, Nation/State, and the Third World: The Imagined Communities in Model Theater.” In Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 159-194.
—–. “Audience, Applause, and Actor: Border Crossing in Social Problem Plays.” In Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 195-234.
—–. “A Stage of Their Own: Feminism, Countervoices, and the Problematic of Women’s Theater.” In Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 235-60.
—–. “From Discontented Mother to Woman Warrior: Body Politics in Post-Maoist Theater.” In Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 261-90.
—–. “A Stage in Search of a Tradition: The Dynamics of Form and Content in Post-Maoist Theater.” Asian Theatre Journal 18, 2 (2001): 200-21. [Project Muse link]. Also in Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, 1966-1996. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002, 291-330.
—–. “Twentieth-Century Spoken Drama.” In Victor H. Mair, ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2001, 848-77.
—–. “Performing the Nation: Modern Spoken Drama.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 437-45. Rpt in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 195-204.
—–. “‘Playing in the Dirt’: Plays about Geologists and Memories of the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist Era.” The China Review 5, 2 (Fall 2005).
—–. “Remembering War and Revolution on the Maoist Stage.” In Andrew Hammond, ed., Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict. New York: Routledge, 2006, 131-145.
—–. “Tian Han and the Southern Society Phenomenon: Networking the Personal, Communal, and Cultural.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 241-79.
—–. “The Road to Revival: A ‘Red’ Classic or a ‘Black’ Revisionist Epic in Praise of a Postsocialist China.” In Ban Wang and Jie Lu, eds. China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012, 183-204. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Xiaobing Tang]
—–. “Modern Chinese Theater Study and its Century-Long History.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., Blackwell History of Modern Chinese Literature. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, 167-180.
—–. Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film and the Afterlives of Propaganda. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016.
[Abstract: surveys fifty years of theatrical propaganda performances in China, revealing a dynamic, commercial capacity in works often dismissed as artifacts of censorship. Spanning the 1960s through the 2010s, Xiaomei Chen reads films, plays, operas, and television shows from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, demonstrating how, in a socialist state with “capitalist characteristics,” propaganda performance turns biographies, memoirs, and war stories into mainstream ideological commodities, legitimizing the state and its right to rule. Analyzing propaganda performance also brings contradictions and inconsistencies to light that throw common understandings about propaganda’s purpose into question. Chen focuses on revisionist histories that stage the lives of the “founding fathers” of the Communist Party, such as Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping, and the engaging mix of elite and ordinary characters that animate official propaganda in the private and public sphere. Taking the form of “personal” memories and representing star and youth culture and cyberspace, contemporary Chinese propaganda appeals through multiple perspectives, complicating relations among self, subject, agent, state building, and national identity. Chen treats Chinese performance as an extended form of political theater confronting critical issues of commemoration, nostalgia, state rituals, and contested history. It is through these reenactments that three generations of revolutionary leaders loom in extraordinary ways over Chinese politics and culture.]
—–. “Singing the ‘Internationale’: From the ‘Red Silk Road’ to the Red Classics.” In Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 193-215.
—–. “Epilogue: A Personal Reflection.” In Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 270-83.
—–. Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theatre and Film Culture. NY: Columbia University Press, 2023. [MCLC Resource Center review by Letizia Fusini]
[Abstract: …. an innovative account of the origins, evolution, and legacies of key trends in twentieth-century Chinese theater. Instead of seeing the Republican, high socialist, and postsocialist periods as radically distinct, it identifies key continuities in theatrical practices and shared aspirations for the social role and artistic achievements of performance across eras. Xiaomei Chen focuses on the long and remarkable careers of three founders of modern Chinese theater and film, Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian, and their legacy, which helped shape theater cultures into the twenty-first century. They introduced Western plays and theories, adapted traditional Chinese operas, and helped develop a tradition of leftist theater in the Republican period that paved the way for the construction of a socialist canon after 1949. Chen investigates how their visions for a free, democratic China fared in the initial years after the founding of the People’s Republic, briefly thriving only to founder as artists had to adapt to the Communist Party’s demand to produce ideologically correct works. Bridging the faith play and “antiparty plays” of the 1950s, the “red classics” of the 1960s, and their reincarnations in the postsocialist period, she considers the transformations of the depictions of women, peasants, soldiers, scientists, and revolutionary history in plays, operas, and films and examines how the market economy, collective memories, star culture, social networks, and state sponsorship affected dramatic productions.]
Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Rosemary Roberts]
[Abstract: The profound political, economic, and social changes in China in the second half of the twentieth century have produced a wealth of scholarship; less studied however is how cultural events, and theater reforms in particular, contributed to the dynamic landscape of contemporary Chinese society. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform fills this gap by investigating the theories and practice of socialist theater and their effects on a diverse range of genres, including Western-style spoken drama, Chinese folk opera, dance drama, Shanghai opera, Beijing opera, and rural theater. Focusing on the 1950s and ’60s, when theater art occupied a prominent political and cultural role in Maoist China, this book examines the efforts to remake theater in a socialist image. It explores the unique dynamics between official discourse, local politics, performance practice, and audience reception that emerged under the pressures of highly politicized cultural reform as well as the off-stage, lived impact of rapid policy change on individuals and troupes obscured by the public record. This multidisciplinary collection by leading scholars covers a wide range of perspectives, geographical locations, specific research methods, genres of performance, and individual knowledge and experience. The richly diverse approach leads readers through a nuanced and complex cultural landscape as it contributes significantly to our understanding of a crucial period in the development of modern Chinese theater and performance.]
Cheng, Yinghong. “Che Guevara: Dramatizing China’s Divided Intelligentsia at the Turn of the Century.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 2 (Fall 2003): 1-44.
Chin, Luke Kai-hsin. The Politics of Drama Reform in China after 1949: Elite Strategies of Resocialization. Ph. D. diss. NY: New York University, 1980.
Chirita, Andreea. “Redefining Borders in Contemporary Chinese Theater: Paper Tiger Theater Studio Performing Kafka’s ‘The Great Wall’.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 34, 1 (Summer 2022): 66-96.
Chou, Katherine Hui-ling. Staging Revolution: Actresses, Realism, and the New Woman Movement in Chinese Spoken Drama and Film, 1919-1949. Ph.D. diss. New York University, 1997.
—–. “Striking Their Own Poses: The History of Cross-dressing on the Chinese Stage.” The Drama Review 41, 2 (Summer 1997): 130-52.
Chun, Tarryn Li-Min. “Adaptation as Hospitality: Shanghai Theatre Academy Winter Institute 2013 Performance Series.” The Drama Review 58, 1 (March 2014): 108-117.
—–. “2002, October 25: Resurrecting a Postlapsarian Pagoda in a Postrevolutionary World.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 883-89.
—–. “Revolutionary Illumination: Stage Lighting, Politics, and Play in 1930s Shanghai Theater.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30, 2 (Fall 2018): 87-140.
—–. “Introduction: Chinese Socialist Theater: Between Revolution and Reform.” In Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 1-33.
—–. “Sent-Down Plays: Yangbanxi Stagecraft, Practical Aesthetic, and Popularization during the Cultural Revolution.” In Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 242-69.
—–. Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024.
[Abstract: Revolutionary Stagecraft draws on a rich corpus of literary, historical, and technical materials to reveal a deep entanglement among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in modern China. This unique approach to Chinese theater history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theater details, and behind-the-scenes debates over “how to” make theater amid the political upheavals of China’s 20th century. The book begins at a pivotal moment in the 1920s—when Chinese theater artists began to import, use, and write about modern stage equipment—and ends in the 1980s when China’s scientific and technological boom began. By examining iconic plays and performances from the perspective of the stage technologies involved, Tarryn Li-Min Chun provides a fresh perspective on their composition and staging. The chapters include stories on the challenges of creating imitation neon, rigging up a makeshift revolving stage, and representing a nuclear bomb detonating onstage. In thinking about theater through technicity, the author mines well-studied materials such as dramatic texts and performance reviews for hidden technical details and brings to light a number of previously untapped sources such as technical journals and manuals; set design renderings, lighting plots, and prop schematics; and stage technology how-to guides for amateur thespians. This approach focuses on material stage technologies, situating these objects equally in relation to their technical potential, their human use, and the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that influence them. In each of its case studies, Revolutionary Stagecraft reveals the complex and at times surprising ways in which Chinese theater artists and technicians of the 20th century envisioned and enacted their own revolutions through the materiality of the theater apparatus.]
—–. “Surface Classicism: Aesthetics, Poetics, and Remediation in Digitally Enhanced Chinese Performance.” Prism 20, 2 (2023): 462-86.
[Abstract: This article examines digital classicism in contemporary Chinese performance through the case study of an excerpt of the dance-drama Zhici qinglü 只此青綠 (Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting) performed at the 2022 CCTV Spring Festival Gala. It argues that the mobilization of digital performance technologies in Zhici qinglü and other contemporary large-scale performance in the PRC generates what might be termed “surface classicism”—an engagement with the past that sublimates elements of classical art and literature into the realm of digitally enhanced visuality. Surface classicism lends itself to critiques of superficiality and inauthenticity, but this article demonstrates that its ubiquity in contemporary culture also creates new networks of relationality among remediations of classical poetics and imagery. Ultimately, the mediation of both liveness and spectacular technologies in contemporary, digitally enhanced performance establishes classicist poetics and imagery as a core component of shared contemporary Chinese culture and may even engender new, more accessible modes of classical erudition.]
Chung, Mingder. The Little Theatre Movement of Taiwan (1980-1989): In Search of Alternative Aesthetics and Politics. Ph.D. diss. NY: New York University, 1992.
Clark, Paul. “Model Theatrical Works and the Remodeling of the Cultural Revolution.” In Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Sheng Tian Zheng, eds. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.
Conceison, Claire. “The Main Melody Campaign in Chinese Spoken Drama.” Asian Theatre Journal 11, 2 (Fall 1994): 190-212.
—–. “International Casting in Chinese Plays: A Tale of Two Cites.” Theater Journal 53, 2 (2001): 277-90. [Project Muse link]
—–. “Hot Tickets: China’s New Generation Takes the Stage.” Persimmon 3, 1 (Spring 2002): 18-27.
—–. “Fleshing out the Dramaturgy of Gao Xingjian.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (Dec. 2002).
—–. Significant Other: Staging the American in China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Siyuan Liu]
[Abstract: Chinese views of the United States have shifted dramatically since the 1980s, with changes in foreign relations, increased travel of Chinese citizens to the U.S., and wide circulation of American popular culture in China. Significant Other explores representations of Americans that emerged onstage in China between 1987 and 2002 and considers how they function as racial and cultural stereotypes, political strategy, and artistic innovation.]
—–. “China’s Experimental Mainstream: The Badass Theatre of Meng Jinghui.” The Drama Review 58, 1 (March 2014): 64-88.
Cong, Xiaoping. “Road to Revival: A New Move in the Making of Legitimacy for the Ruling Party in China.” Journal of Contemporary China 22 (83) (Sept. 2013): 905-22.
[Abstract: Road to Revival, as the third musical epic in the People’s Republican history, was produced and publicized in 2009 in order to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the PRC. Like the previous two epics, Revival expressed and promoted the official ideology of the time. Through a close reading of Revival‘s artistic presentation and comparison with the two similar musical epics, The East Is Red and The Laud for the Chinese Revolution, this article demonstrates that traditional political theory such as the “mandate of heaven” (tianming) is now revitalizing and being adapted to construct the party’s legitimacy. In constructing a new legitimacy for the party, Revival does not only depoliticize and recast the histories of the CCP and modern China but also tries to establish a foundation for the party’s rule by displaying its successful performance in governance which has gradually become the groundwork in shaping the party’s new legitimacy.]
Dai Jiafang 戴嘉枋. Yangbanxi de fengfengyunyun: Jiang Qing, yangbanxi ji neimu 样板戏的凤风云云: 江青，样板戏及内幕 (The storm around model drama: Jiang Qing, model drama, and behind the scenes). Beijing: Zhonghua gongshang lianhe, 1994
Davis, A. R. “Out of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ Tokyo 1907: A Preliminary Look at the Beginnings of the Spoken Drama in China.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 6, 1/2 (1968/69): 33-49.
DeMare, Brian. “Local Actors and National Politics: Rural Amateur Drama Troupes and Mass Campaigns in Hubei Province, 1949-1953.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 2 (Fall 2012): 129-178.
—–. Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in China’s Rural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
[Abstract: Charting their training, travels, and performances, this innovative study explores the role of the artists that roamed the Chinese countryside in support of Mao’s communist revolution. DeMare traces the development of Mao’s ‘cultural army’ from its genesis in Red Army propaganda teams to its full development as a largely civilian force composed of amateur and professional drama troupes in the early years of the PRC. Drawing from memoirs, artistic handbooks, and rare archival sources, Mao’s Cultural Army uncovers the arduous and complex process of creating revolutionary dramas that would appeal to China’s all-important rural audiences. The Communists strived for a disciplined cultural army to promote party policies, but audiences often shunned modern and didactic shows, and instead clamoured for traditional works. DeMare illustrates how drama troupes, caught between the party and their audiences, did their best to resist the ever growing reach of the PRC state.]
—–. “Drama from Beijing to Long Bow: Reforming Shanxi Stages in Socialist China.” In Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 187-215.
Denton, Kirk A. “Model Drama as Myth: A Semiotic Analysis of Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy.” In C. Tung, ed. Drama in the People’s Republic of China. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987, 119-36.
Diamond, Catherine. The Role of Cross-Cultural Adaptation in the Little Theatre Movement in Taiwan. Ph.D. diss. Seattle: University of Washington, 1993.
—–. “The Masking and Unmasking of the Yu Theatre Ensemble.” Asian Theatre Journal 10, 1 (1993): 101-14.
—–. “Cracks in the Arch of Illusion: Contemporary Experiments in Taiwan’s Peking Opera.” Theatre Research International 20, 3 (1995): 237-54.
—–. “Reflected and Refracted: Metatheatrics in Taiwan.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 9, 2 (1995): 84-96.
DiBiello, Michelle. “Longing for Worldly Pleasures: An Example of the Sacred vs. the Profane in Contemporary Chinese Drama.” Chinoperl Papers 18 (1996): 67-78.
Ding, Luonan. “Examining Experimental Theater in Contemporary China.” Tr. Nienyuan Cheng. Chinese Literature Today 8, 2 (2019): 45-51.
Dittmer, Lowell. “Radical Ideology and Chinese Political Culture: An Analysis of the Revolutionary Yangbanxi.” In Richard Wilson, Sidney Greenblatt, Amy Wilson, eds., Moral Behaviour in Chinese Society. NY: Praeger, 1981, 126-51.
Ding, Yangzhong. “Brecht’s Theatre and Chinese Drama.” In A. Tatlow and Tak-Wai Wong, eds., Brecht and East Asian Theatre. HK: HKUP, 1982, 28-45.
Dong, Jian. “Withering of the Spirit of Contemporary Chinese Drama.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 1, 4 (Oct. 2007): 571-80.
Du, Wenwei. “Xiaopin: Chinese Theatrical Skits as Both Creatures and Critics of Commercialism.” China Quarterly 154 (June 1998): 382-99.
Eberstein, Bernd. Das Chinesische Theater im 20. Jahrhundert (Chinese theater in the twentieth century). Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1983.
Electronic Theater Intermix in Taiwan
[ETI is a non-profitable on-line database programmed for modern theater in Taiwan. Until November 2004, the first project of ETI has collected more than one hundred media works, historical records and biographies authorized by artists and performing groups since August 2003. The Online Catalogue preserves and distributes a major collection of performances of artists/performing groups for the purpose of education, academic research and cultural conservation.]
Entell, Bettina S. Post-Tian’anmen: A New Era in Chinese Theatre. Experimentation during the 1990s at Beijing’s China National Experimental Theatre/CNET. PhD diss. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2002.
Evans, Megan. “‘Brand China’ on the World Stage: Jingju, the Olympics, and Globalization .” TDR: The Drama Review 56, 2 (Summer 2012): 113-30.
Fan, Xing. “The ‘Broken’ and the ‘Breakthroughs’: Acting in Jingju Model Plays of China’s Culture Revolution.” Asian Theatre Journal 30, 2 (Fall 2013): 360-389.
—–. “Revolutionary Femininity in Performance: Female Characters in Beijing Opera Model Plays during China’s Cultural Revolution.” In Ya-chen Chen, ed., New Modern Chinese Women and Gender Politics: The Centennial of the End of the Qing Dynasty. London: Routledge, 2014, 51–72.
—–. “Stars on the Rise: The Jingju Actresses in Republican China.” In Arya Madhavan, ed., Women in Asian Performance: Aesthetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 2017.
Fei, Faye C. “Dramatizing the West in Chinese Spoken Drama.” Asian Theatre Journal 15, 1 (Spring 1998): 102-16.
[Abstract: Arguing from Foucault’s theory of the “disappearing author,” Faye C. Fei claims that Chinese playwrights do not place individualistic signatures on their work, a phenomenon particularly noticeable in plays dealing with China’s foreign relations of the 1949-76 period. She investigates the anti-imperialist huaju drama of that era, during which the outside world was perceived according to Maoist doctrine as the enemy and foreigners were considered “devils.”
Ferrari, Rossella. Da Madre Courage e i suoi figli a Jiang Qing e i suoi mariti. Percorsi brechtiani in Cina ( From Mother Courage and her Children to Jiang Qing and her Husbands. Brechtian Trajectories in China).Venice: Cafoscarina, 2004.
—–. “Avant-garde Drama and Theater: China” In Cody, Gabrielle and Sprinchorn, Evert, eds., The Columbia Encyclopaedia of Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
—–. Pop Goes the Avant-garde: Meng Jinghui and Contemporary Chinese Avant-garde Theatre. PhD diss. London: SOAS, 2007.
—–. “The Avant-Garde Is Dead, Long Live the (Pop) Avant-Garde! Critical Reconfigurations in Contemporary Chinese Theatre.” positions: asia critique 20, 4 (Fall 2012): 1127-1157.
—–. Pop Goes the Avant-garde: Experimental Theater in Contemporary China. London, NY, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012. [MCLC Resource Center review by Claire Conceison]
[Abstract: The first comprehensive review of the history and development of avant-garde drama and theater in the PRC since 1976. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives in the fields of comparative literature, theater, performance, and culture studies, the book explores key artistic movements and phenomena that have emerged in China’s major cultural centers in the last several decades. It surveys the work of China’s most influential dramatists, directors and performance groups, with a special focus on Beijing-based playwright, director and filmmaker Meng Jinghui–the former enfant terrible of Beijing theater, who is now one of Asia’s foremost theater personalities. Through an extensive critique of theories of modernism and the avant-garde, the author reassesses the meanings, functions and socio-historical significance of this work in non-Western contexts by proposing a new theoretical construct–the pop avant-garde–and exploring new ways to understand and conceptualize aesthetic practices beyond Euro-American cultures and critical discourses.]
—–. “Contemporary Experimental Theaters in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 320-26.
—–. Transnational Chinese Theatres: Intercultural Performance Networks in East Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
[Abstract: Transnational Chinese Theatres is the first systematic study of networks of performance collaboration in the contemporary Chinese-speaking world and of their interactions with the artistic communities of the wider East Asian region. It investigates the aesthetics and politics of collaboration to propose a new transnational model for the analysis of Sinophone theatre cultures and to foreground the mobility and relationality of intercultural performance in East Asia. The research draws on extensive fieldwork, interviews with practitioners, and direct observation of performances, rehearsals, and festivals in Asia and Europe. It offers provocative close readings and discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of hitherto untapped sources, including unreleased video materials and unpublished scripts, production notes, and archival documentation.]
Fleming, Brent Leonard. Theatre Management Procedures: An Operations Manual for the Cultural Center Theatres in Taiwan, the Republic of China. Ph.D.diss. Texas Technical University, 1987.
Gálik, Marián. “Deviant Love and Violence in Modern Chinese Decadent Drama.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 11, 2 (2002): 185-204.
—–. “Echoes of the Biblical Shulamite and Wilde’s Salome in three Modern Chinese Plays.” Monumenta Serica 68, 1 (2020): 197-225.
[Abstract: Among European dramatists of the fin de siècle, Oscar Wilde was received enthusiastically in Chinese literary circles of the 1920s and 1930s, in particular his decadent drama Salome. Modern Chinese playwrights adapted the biblical figure of Salome, along with Shulamite of the Song of Songs. The present article offers three case studies of the reception of these two biblical figures in Chinese dramas of the Republican period, namely Xiang Peiliang’s 向培良 (1901–1965) one-act play Annen 暗嫩 (Amnon), Xu Baoyan’s 徐葆炎 three-act-play Da Ji 妲己 and Su Xuelin’s 蘇雪林 (1897–1999) tragedy Jiunaluo de yanjing 鳩那羅的眼睛 (Kunāla’s Eyes). Besides analyzing the impact of the Bible and of Western decadent literature on these works, the author of the present article also deals with their Chinese literary sources, e.g., the traditional novel Fengshen yanyi 封神演義 (The Investiture of the Gods) and Buddhist biographies of King Aśoka. Love, beauty, death, and violence are identified as the most important elements of the plays under discussion.]
Gentz, Natascha. “Jiang Qing and the Year of Nora 1935: Drama and Politics in the Republican Period.” Ibsen in China website.
—–. “1907, June 1: Global Theatrical Spectacle in Tokyo and Shanghai.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 208-14.
Goldstein, Joshua. “Mei Lanfang and the Nationalization of Peking Opera, 1912-1930.” positions: east asia cultures critique 7, 2 (1999) 377-420.
—–. Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1870-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
[Abstract: In this colorful and detailed history, Joshua Goldstein describes the formation of the Peking opera in late Qing and its subsequent rise and re-creation as the epitome of the Chinese national culture in Republican era China. Providing a fascinating look into the lives of some of the opera’s key actors, he explores their methods for earning a living; their status in an ever-changing society; the methods by which theaters functioned; the nature and content of performances; audience make-up; and the larger relationship between Peking opera and Chinese nationalism. Propelled by a synergy of the commercial and the political patronage from the Qing court in Beijing to modern theaters in Shanghai and Tianjin, Peking opera rose to national prominence. The genre’s star actors, particularly male cross-dressing performers led by the exquisite Mei Lanfang and the “Four Great Female Impersonators” became media celebrities, models of modern fashion and world travel. Ironically, as it became increasingly entrenched in modern commercial networks, Peking opera was increasingly framed in post-May fourth discourses as profoundly traditional. Drama Kings demonstrates that the process of reforming and marketing Peking opera as a national genre was integrally involved with process of colonial modernity, shifting gender roles, the rise of capitalist visual culture, and new technologies of public discipline that became increasingly prevalent in urban China in the Republican era.]
Greene, Maggie. “A Ghostly Bodhisattva and the Price of Vengeance: Meng Chao, Li Huiniang, and the Politics of Drama, 1959-1979.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 1 (Spring 2012): 149-99.
—–. Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Letizia Fusini]
[Abstract: Resisting Spirits is a reconsideration of the significance and periodization of literary production in the high socialist era, roughly 1953 through 1966, specifically focused on Mao-era culture workers’ experiments with ghosts and ghost plays. Greene combines rare manuscript materials—such as theatre troupes’ annotated practice scripts—with archival documents, memoirs, newspapers, and films to track key debates over the direction of socialist aesthetics. Through arguments over the role of ghosts in literature, Greene illuminates the ways in which culture workers were able to make space for aesthetic innovation and contestation both despite and because of the constantly shifting political demands of the Mao era. Ghosts were caught up in the broader discourse of superstition, modernization, and China’s social and cultural future. Yet, as Greene demonstrates, the ramifications of those concerns as manifested in the actual craft of writing and performing plays led to further debates in the realm of literature itself: If we remove the ghost from a ghost play, does it remain a ghost play? Does it lose its artistic value, its didactic value, or both? At the heart of Greene’s intervention is “just reading”: the book regards literature first as literature, rather than searching immediately for its political subtext, and the voices of dramatists themselves finally upstage those of Mao’s inner circle. Ironically, this surface reading reveals layers of history that scholars of the Mao era have often ignored, including the ways in which social relations and artistic commitments continued to inform the world of art. Focusing on these concerns points to continuities and ruptures in the cultural history of modern China beyond the bounds of “campaign time.” Resisting Spirits thus illuminates the origins of more famous literary inquisitions, including that surrounding Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, by exploring ghost plays such as Li Huiniang that at first appear more innocent. To the contrary, Greene shows how the arguments surrounding ghost plays and the fates of their authors place the origins of the Cultural Revolution several years earlier, with a radical new shift in the discourse of theatre.
—–. “Navigating Bureaucratic ‘Gusts of Wind’: Reform and The Theater World, 1949-1965.” In Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 107-34.
Gunn, Edward. “Shanghai’s ‘Orphan Island’ and the Development of Modern Drama.” In Bonnie McDougall, ed. Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the PRC, 1949-1979. Berkeley: UCP, 1984, 36-53.
Guo, Li. “Rethinking Theatrical Images of the New Woman in China’s Republican Era.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, 2 (2013).
Guy, Nancy. Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan. Champaign: University of Illinois, 2005.
[Abstract: examines the political and cultural uses of Peking Opera by the GMD on Taiwan]
He, Chengzhou. Henrik Ibsen and Modern Chinese Drama. Oslo: Unipub AS, 2004. [pdf file downlaod from Ibsen in China website]
—–. “Women and the Search for Modernity: Rethinking Modern Chinese Drama.” Modern Language Quarterly 69, 1 (2008): 45-60.
[Abstract: Because the theories of Chinese modernity are mainly organized around a masculine norm and pay insufficient attention to the specificity of women’s lives and experiences, it is of great significance to carry out research on women’s complex and changing relationships to the political, philosophical, and cultural legacies of Chinese modernity. This essay explores the relationship of women to Chinese modernity through a close reading of canonical texts from modern Chinese drama. The transformations of women in Chinese spoken plays during the first half of the twentieth century reflect the complex experiences of Chinese women in their search for modernity. The Nora figures in Chinese problem plays are symbols of individualism and subjectivism. The women in Cao Yu’s plays, whose education is informed by feminist ideas, become subjects of their desires for consumption and love. The female fighters in revolutionary drama further deconstruct the patriarchy of gender, and their stories influenced the new development of gender politics in modern China. In general, the discourses of women’s liberation were refashioned on the different stages of modern Chinese drama in parallel with the development of modern Chinese society. The essay suggests that women were actually heroines of Chinese modernity.]
He, Man. The Peacock on Stage and in Print: A Study of the 1920s New Drama Adaptations of Southeast Flies the Peacock. MA thesis. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University, 2009.
—–. Chinese Play-Making: Cosmopolitan Intellectuals, Transnational Stages, and Modern Drama, 1910s-1940s. Ph.D. diss. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 2015.
—–. “1935, December 21: Crossing the River and Ding County Experimental Theater.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 414-20.
—–. “Juren (Men and Women of Theatre) in the Confucian Temple: Techniques, Prompts, and Plays to Serve the Nation, 1934-1945.” Asian Theatre Journal 38, 1 (Spring 2021): 245-274.
He, Yuming. “Wang Guowei and the Beginnings of Modern Chinese Drama Studies.” Late Imperial China 28, 2 (March 2008): 129-56.
Howard, Roger. Contemporary Chinese Theatre. London: Heinemann, 1978.
Huang, Alexander. “Introduction: Modern Taiwanese Theatre.” In Samuel Leiter, ed., Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007.
—–. “Western Influence on Taiwan’s Theatre.” In Samuel Leiter, ed., Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007.
Huang, Nicole. “Azalea Mountain and Late Mao Culture.” The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 402-25.
Hung, Chang-tai. “Female Symbols of Resistance in Chinese Wartime Spoken Drama.” Modern China 15 (April 1989): 149-177.
Huot, Claire. “Away from Literature II: Words Acted Out.” In Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, 72-90.
Ibsen in China [Nanjing University sponsored website].
Idema, Wilt. “1954, September 25-November 2: The Emergence of Regional Opera on the National Stage.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 585-90.
Inouye, Mei Li. Performing Jiang Qing (1914-1991): Gender, Performance, and Power in Modern China. Ph.d diss. Stanford University, 2020.
—–. “Soviet Dramatic Theory and Dramas on Stage in 1930s Shanghai.” International Comparative Literature 5, 2 (Fall 2022).
Iovene, Paola and Judith T. Zeitlin, guest editors. Chinese Opera Film, a special issue of The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010).
Jiang, David. “Shanghai Revisited: Chinese Theatre and the Forces of the Market.” The Drama Review 38, 2 (1994): 72-80.
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.]
Jiang, Jing. “Chinese Salomes on the Chinese Stage.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, 2 (Fall 2011): 175-209.
Jin, Fu. A History of Chinese Theatre in the Twentieth Century. 4 vols. NY: Routledge, 2020-22.
Jin, Li. “Theater of Pathos: Sentimental Melodramas in the New Drama Legacy.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 2 (Fall 2012): 94-128.
Judd, Ellen. “Prescriptive Dramatic Theory of the Cultural Revolution.” In Constantine Tung and Colin MacKerras, eds., Drama in the People’s Republic of China. Albany: SUNY, 1987, 95-118.
Kaulbach, Barbara. “Street Theatre in China in the 1930s.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 10, 2 (2001): 148-59.
Kubin, Wolfgang. “The Paradigm of Inhibited Action Concerning the 20th Century Chinese Theatre.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 6, 1 (1997): 92-102.
Kuoshu, Harry. Lightness of Being in China: Adaptation and Discursive Figuration in Cinema and Theater. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
Lai, Stan. “Specifying the Universal.” TDR: The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies 38, 2 (1994): 33-37.
Lei, Daphne P. Alternative Chinese Opera in the Age of Globalization: Performing Zero. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
[Abstract: Bringing the study of Chinese theatre into the 21st-century, Lei discusses ways in which traditional art can survive and thrive in the age of modernization and globalization. Building on her previous work, this new book focuses on various forms of Chinese “opera” in locations around the Pacific Rim, including Hong Kong, Taiwan and California.]
—–. Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
[Abstract: A pprovocative analysis of Chinese opera as experienced and practiced across multiple stages. Unlike traditional scholarship on Chinese opera, Operatic China examines theatrical and paratheatrical performance, theatre critique, ethnographic writings, local histories, and theories of performance, interculturalism, and transnationalism.]
Leibenluft, Michael and Maja-Stina Johansson Wang. “Spiritual Farming: Performance at Shanghai’s Downstream Garage.” The Drama Review 58, 1 (March 2014): 21-41.
Li, Jessica Tsui Yan. “Female Body and Identities: Re-presenting Ibsen’s Nora in China Doll.” In K.K. Tam, Terry S. Yip and Frode Helland eds., Ibsen and the Modern Self. Hong Kong: Open University of Hong Kong Press, and Oslo: Centre for Ibsen’s Studies, University of Oslo Publications, 2010, 298-310.
Li, Kay. Bernard Shaw and China: Cross-Cultural Encounters. Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
Li, Ruru. “The Bard in the Middle Kingdom.” Asian Theatre Journal 12, 1 (Spring 1995): 50-84.
—–. “Macbeth Becomes Ma Pei, An Odyssey from Scotland to China.” Theatre Research International 20, 1 (Spring 1995): 42-53.
—–. “The 1994 Shanghai International Shakespeare Festival: An Update on the Bard in Cathay.” Asian Theatre Journal 14, 1 (Spring 1997): 93-119.
—–. “Shakespeare on the Chinese Stage in the 1990s.” Shakespeare Quarterly 50, 3 (Fall 1999): 355-367.
—–. “Sino the Times: Three Spoken Drama Productions on the Beijing Stage.” The Drama Review 45, 2 (2001). [deals with three recent drama productions in the PRC: a production of Gogol’s The Inspector General;Boundless Love, the play about the Ming literatus Li Yu; and Che Guevara; downloadable pdf file of entire article available here]
—–. “Millenium Shashibiya: Where Does Shakespeare Stand in Today’s China.” [unpublished paper for the Shakespeare Performance in the New Asias conference, National University of Singapore, June 28-30, 2002]
—–. “Mao’s Chair: Revolutionizing Chinese Theatre.” Theatre Research International 27, 1 (March 2002): 1-17.
—–. Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2003.
—–. “A Drum! A Drum! Macbeth doth come! – When Birnam wood moved to China.” Shakespeare Survey 57 (Oct. 2004).
—–. The Soul of Beijing Opera: Theatrical Creativity and Continuity in the Changing World. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2010. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Siyuan Liu]
[Abstract: looks at the evolution of singing and performance styles, make-up and costume, audience demands, as well as stage and street presentation modes amid tumultuous social and political changes. Li’s study follows a number of major artists’ careers in mainland China and Taiwan, drawing on extensive primary print sources as well as personal interviews with performers and their cultural peers. One chapter focuses on the illustrious career of Li’s own mother and how she adapted to changes in Communist ideology. In addition, she explores how performers as social beings have responded to conflicts between tradition and modernity, and between convention and innovation. Through performers’ negotiation and compromises, Beijing opera has undergone constant re-examination of its inner artistic logic and adjusted to the demands of the external world.]
—–. “The Market, Ideology, and Convention: Jingju Performers’ Creativity in the 21st Century.” TDR: The Drama Review 56, 2 (Summer 2012): 131-51.
Li, Siu Leung. Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera. HK: HK University Press, 2003.
Liao, Hongyue. “Charity, Commerce, and Culture in Modern China: The Wing On Amateur Dramatic Club, 1923–1949.” Twentieth-Century China 43, no. 2 (2018): 101-119.
[Abstract: This article examines the connections between commerce and culture in the development of charity in modern China through a case study of the charity performances of the Wing On Amateur Dramatic Club from 1923 to 1949. The argument mounted here is that the entry of modern commercial corporations into an evolving charity sector marked a new phase in the evolution of Chinese philanthropy, with business firms, not merely merchants, contributing to various charitable causes as corporate citizens by contributing key resources and undertaking corporate charitable activities. The case of the Wing On Amateur Dramatic Club, a Cantonese opera piaofang (amateur performers’ club) set up within the Wing On Department Store in Hong Kong and Shanghai, reveals an appetite for innovation within the indigenous corporate sector in its linking of staff development, artistic performances, corporate culture, and charitable fund-raising for community and corporate benefit.]
Lilley, Rozanna. Staging Hong Kong: Gender and Performance in Transition. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1998.
Lim, Wah Guan. Denationalizing Identities: The Politics of Performance in the Chinese Diaspora. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024.
[Abstract: Denationalizing Identities explores the relationship between performance and ideology in the global Sinosphere. Wah Guan Lim’s study of four important diasporic director-playwrights—Gao Xingjian, Stan Lai Sheng-chuan, Danny Yung Ning Tsun, and Kuo Pao Kun—shows the impact of theater on ideas of “Chineseness” across China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. At the height of the Cold War, the “Bamboo Curtain” divided the “two Chinas” across the Taiwan Strait. Meanwhile, Hong Kong prepared for its handover to the People’s Republic of China and Singapore rethought Chinese education. As geopolitical tensions imposed ethno-nationalist identities across the region, these four dramatists wove together local, foreign, and Chinese elements in their art, challenging mainland China’s narrative of an inevitable communist outcome. By performing cultural identities alternative to the ones sanctioned by their own states, they debunked notions of a unified Chineseness. Denationalizing Identities highlights the key role theater and performance played in circulating people and ideas across the Chinese-speaking world, well before cross-strait relations began to thaw.
Lin, Fengxia. The Memoirs of Lin Fengxia. Ed./tr. John Chinnery. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
[Abstract: Lin Fengxia (1927-1998), one of the most celebrated actresses of the last fifty years, grew up and came of age during some of the most dramatic episodes in Chinese history. Her memoirs provide a balanced, unsentimental view of China’s history in this century as well as a record of the important Chinese theatre known as pingju.]
Liu, Jiacheng. “Writing on Actresses and the Modern Transformation of Opera Fandom in 1910s Beijing.” Modern China 44, 6 (2018): 433-65.
[Abstract: This article explores the modern transformation of opera fandom in early twentieth-century China through the hitherto unexamined fan literature about actresses by men of letters. Ostensibly conservative in both its style, based on earlier huapu (flower registers) writing, and its invocation of Confucian values, fan literature was caught up in the political and literary ferment of the times, proving to be startlingly innovative in developing new genres and appropriating reformist discourses. In promoting their preferred actresses, opera fans, writing in a sentimental style, dominated the public sphere of theater commentary and fought over the ethical position of women performers and their admirers. In some regard, the writings of opera fans in early Republican Beijing paralleled Butterfly fiction and the fans themselves constituted a sentiment-based, morally conflicted, and politically conservative urban public. The article argues that opera fandom was simultaneously a conservative response to modernity and the very embodiment of the creation of the Chinese modern.]
Liu, Joyce C. “Re-staging Cultural Memories in Contemporary Theatre in Taiwan: Wang Qimei, Stanley Lai, and Lin Huaimin.” In Steven Totosy de Zepetnek and Jennifer W. Jay, eds., East Asian Cultural and Historical Perspectives: Histories and Society, Culture and Literatures. Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature and Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, 1997, 267-78.
Liu, Ping. “The Left-Wing Drama Movement and Its Relationship to Japan.” Tr. by Krista van Fleit. positions: east asia cultures critique 14, 2 (2006): 449-66. [Project Muse link]
Liu, Siyuan. “The Impact of Shinpa on Early Chinese Huaju.” Asian Theater Journal 23, 2 (2006): 342-55. [Project Muse link]
—–. “A Mixed-blooded Child, Neither Western nor Eastern: Sinicization of Western-style Theatre in Rural China in the 1930s.” Asian Theatre Journal 25, no. 2 (2008): 272-297.
—–. Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by John B. Weinstein]
[Abstract: In Shanghai during the early portion of the twentieth century, a hybrid theatrical form emerged that was based on Western spoken theatre, classical Chinese theatre, and a Japanese hybrid form of kabuki and Western-style spoken theatre called shinpa (new school drama). Known as wenmingxi (civilized drama), this form has, until recently, largely been ignored by scholars in China and the West as it does not fit into the current binary “traditional/modern” model in non-Western theatre and performance studies. This book places wenmingxi in the context of its hybridized literary and performance elements, giving it a definitive place in modern Chinese theatre.]
—–. “‘Ruined by Several Actresses who Added Lewd Elements’: The Popularity of Emerging Actresses in Chinese Jingju (Beijing Opera)) and the Censorship of Two Plays.” In Arya Madhavan, ed., Women in Asian Performance: Aesthetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 2017.
—–. “The Campaign against Scenario Plays in China the 1950s.” In Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 61-83.
Liu, Siyuan. Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Letizia Fusini]
[Abstract: Shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the PRC launched a reform campaign that targeted traditional song and dance theater encompassing more than a hundred genres, collectively known as xiqu. Reformers censored or revised xiqu plays and techniques; reorganized star-based private troupes; reassigned the power to create plays from star actors to the newly created functions of playwright, director, and composer; and eliminated market-oriented functionaries such as agents. While the repertoire censorship ended in the 1980s, major reform elements have remained: many traditional scripts (or parts of them) are no longer in performance; actors whose physical memory of repertoire and acting techniques had been the center of play creation, have been superseded by directors, playwrights, and composers. The net result is significantly diminished repertoires and performance techniques, and the absence of star actors capable of creating their own performance styles through new signature plays that had traditionally been one of the hallmarks of a performance school. Transforming Tradition offers a systematic study of the effects of the comprehensive reform of traditional theater conducted in the 1950s and ’60s, and is based on a decade’s worth of exhaustive research of official archival documents, wide-ranging interviews, and contemporaneous publications, most of which have never previously been referenced in scholarly research.]
Luo, Liang. “The Experimental and the Popular in Chinese Socialist Theater in the 1950s.” In Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 135-61.
—–. “Modern Chinese Drama Across Media and Worlds: Centered on the Case of the White Snake.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 169-84.
Luo, Suwen. “Gender on Stage: Actresses in an Actors’ World (1895-1930).” In Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds., Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, 75-96.
Ma, Nan. “Transmediating Kinesthesia: Wu Xiaobang and Modern Dance in China, 1929–1939.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, 1 (Spring 2016): 129-173
Mackerras, Colin. The Chinese Theatre in Modern Times: From 1840 to the Present Day. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975.
—–. The Performing Arts in Contemporary China. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
—–. “The Taming of the Shrew: Chinese Theatre and Social Change Since Mao.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 1 (1979): 1-18.
—–. “Drama and Politics in Mainland China, 1976-89.” In Bih-jaw Lin, ed. Post-Mao Sociopolitical Changes in Mainland China: The Literary Perspective. Taibei: Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, 1991, 109-38.
Mazzilli, Mary. “Race, Occidentalism/Orientalism and Sino-centrism in Contemporary Chinese Theatre.” In Tiziana Morosetti and Osita Okagbue, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 465-86.
[Abstract: Building on Chen Xiaomei’s Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China and Claire Conceison’s Significant Other: Staging the American in China, this chapter focuses on how race is performed on the contemporary Chinese stage, especially in relation to its white other counterpart, discussing whether Chinese Occidentalism may further perpetuate a discourse of cultural Orientalism by constructing racialist stereotypes. By examining, in particular, the work of Wang Chong as one of the new faces in Chinese theatre, this chapter will point out to the Chinese global and transnational presence, asking if we can we talk about a form of cultural Sino-centrism disguised under a deconstructed racial fluidity. In addressing these questions, the chapter will more specifically be considering when the white other enters China through the vehicle of adaptation and translation of Western contemporary theatre on the Chinese stage and most importantly when China looks outwards exporting their own history abroad.]
Meng, Jinghui. “Beijing’s Experimental Theatre.” In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 76-79.
Merkel-Hess, Kate. “Acting Out Reform: Theatre and Village in the Republican Rural Reconstruction Movement.” Twentieth-Century China 37, no. 2 (2012): 161-180.
Modern Chinese Drama [contains plots synopsis of some 20 modern Chinese spoken dramas]
Mowry, Hua-yuan Li. Yang-pan hsi–New Theater in China. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 1973.
Ng, How Wee. Drama Box and the Social Theatre of Singapore: Cultural Intervention and Artistic Autonomy 1990-2006. Singapore: Drama Box, 2024.
[Abstract: Published 13 years ago in Chinese, the book received critical acclaim for its “comprehensive insight” into cultural policies and “excellent analysis” of the company’s theatre practice which “amplifies the voices of marginalised communities.” Now available in English, it has been updated and edited for a wider readership. The many questions raised by the author Ng How Wee remain highly pertinent today, including whether theatre should, and how it can serve as cultural intervention, have become more significant than ever as practitioners now must negotiate their artistic autonomy with the state and other funding bodies within the wider global context of growing economic inequalities, living costs, climate change, political and military conflicts.]
Pan, Ping. “Triumphant Dancing in Chains: Two Productions of Chinese Huaju Plays in the Late 1980s.” Asian Theatre Journal 16, 1 (Spring 1999): 107-20.
[Abstract: Elsewhere in this issue the subject of political repression of classical Chinese theatre is addressed. More likely to be the target of such hard-line censorship is the modern spoken drama (huaju). Two important examples of plays that found themselves the subject of scrutiny are Doggy Man Nirvana and Stories of Mulberry Plot Village, both premiered during the 1980s. Ping Pan here discusses how each work successfully found a way around the suppressive political campaign.
Peng, Xu. “Hearing the Opera: ‘Teahouse Mimesis’ and the Aesthetics of Noise in Early Jingju Recordings, 1890s-1910s.” Chinoperl 36 (2017): 1-21.
[Abstract: Noise as an element evocative of teahouse atmosphere was part of the voice of opera in China at the turn of the twentieth century. As such, Chinese listeners embraced the talking machine wholeheartedly from the very beginning and reckoned with its musical force within the paradigm of high-class arts. We find an opposition in the early reception of the phonograph in the Western context in which concert-hall or opera-house performances encouraged the serious spirit of nineteenth-century musical romanticism. In this essay I list specific examples of teahouse theaters with phonographic musical accompaniment to early film. Such examples gleaned from newspapers do not appear consistently after the year 1910, suggesting that year may reasonably be considered a watershed in terms of the tentative endings of the symbiotic existence of phonographic music and live operatic performance. This special Chinese mindset paved the way for the gramophone to enter urban households as an “operatic singing machine.” I contend that the Chinese listening habit cultivated in the boisterous acoustic environment of teahouse theaters had prepared the Chinese opera buff to focus on the meaningful operatic voice against the sonic backdrop of the “ambient” noise, an aesthetic experience similar to listening to early opera records.
Qian, Ying. “The Shopfloor as Stage: Production Competition, Democracy, and the Unfulfilled Promise of Red Flag Song.” China Perspectives 2 (2015): 7-14.
Rebull, Ann. “Locating Theatricality on Stage and Screen: Rescuing Performance Practice and the Phenomenon of Fifteen Strings of Cash (Shiwu guan; 1956).” Chinoperl 36 (2017): 46-71.
[Abstract: Theatricality, or an aesthetics of exaggeration, is the highlight and defining characteristic of the stage in xiqu (indigenous Chinese drama). When Maoist art fell under the general aegis of socialist realism, however, xiqu leaders undertook significant changes to performance practice, including the general execution of traditional gesture. These changes initiated a conversation about the value of theatricality that spanned across the theater industry, and fundamentally challenged the hegemony of the realist aesthetic regime. Amidst the crescendoing discussion on theatricality, the hit Kunqu play Fifteen Strings of Cash (Shiwu guan; 1956) helped revive interest in the rich tradition of aestheticized movement. At the time of its move to the silver screen, the film world was debating how to respond to the aesthetic consequences of the clash between an actor-centered, theatrical art and an immersive, realist one. Fifteen Strings of Cash interfaced the concerns of the cinematic world with the continuously changing discourse on theatricality. In this article, I use this government-sanctioned, popular culture hit to look at the dynamic history of official discourse on theatrical gesture. I explore the influences on the revival of theatricality, whether from rival portions of theater officialdom, or the force of entertainment culture across media, and how these factors mixed with nationalism.
—–. “Chasing Spirits in the Script: The Ambivalent Politics of Early Socialist Theatrical Adaptation.” In Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 84-106.
Salter, Denis. “China’s Theatre of Dissent: A Conversation with Mou Sen and Wu Wenguang.” Asian Theatre Journal 13, 2 (Fall 1996): 218-228.
[Abstract: Mou Sen, thirty-two, is the artistic director of the Beijing-based Xi Ju Che Jian (“Garage Theatre”). His production of File Zero, based on the documentary poem of the same title (Ling Dang An) by the thirty-nine-year-old avant-garde poet Yu Jian, has toured, since its premiere at the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels in May 1994, to fifteen cities throughout Europe and Canada. Plans are under way for an extensive U.S. tour in 1996. Complicated negotiations are taking place to present File Zero in mainland China, as well, where its subtextual critique of dominant ideologies–in combination with its unique stylistic mixture of documentary realism and symbolic stage images–are guaranteed to make it controversial. In this interview, Denis Salter speaks both to Mou Sen and to the actor (and sometime documentary filmmaker) Wu Wenguang, who narrates one of four bureaucratic “files” or personal stories that make up the dramatic structure of File Zero.
Scott, A.C. Actors are Madmen: A Notebook of a Theatergoer in China. Madison: Univesity of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
Shen, Liang. “Performing Dream or Reality: The Dilemma of Chinese Community-Based Theatre.” The Drama Review 58, 1 (March 2014): 16-23.
Sohigian, Diran John. “Confucius and the Lady in Question: Power Politics, Cultural Production and the Performance of Confucius Saw Nanzi in China in 1929.” Twentieth-Century China 36, 1 (Jan. 2011): 23-43.
Song, Baozhen. “‘Little Theater’ in Twenty-First-Century China.” Tr. Josh Stenberg. Chinese Literature Today 8, 2 (2019): 58-65.
Special issue on Taiwan Theatre. E-Renlei Magazine 84 (2011).
Su, Fei. “Market Success in a Planned Culture: Illegal Theatrical Performances in Post–Great Leap Forward China.” Modern China 49, 4 (2023).
[Abstract: After 1949, PRC sought to transform the production of popular culture from a market-based business into a section of the planned economy under the party-state. I term this new cultural system “planned culture,” as it followed the same practices as the planned economy system. But in practice, a strong planned culture was hard to maintain with scarce fiscal resources. It faced constant challenges from the cultural market in the Mao Zedong era, especially when the state temporarily retreated from the economic and cultural fields in the post–Great Leap Forward period. By depicting the different faces of unofficial culture, ranging from villages and suburban townships to big cities, this article argues that the state’s cultural reach in the Mao era was limited both by a lack of capacity and sometimes by preference, and that planned culture in the post–Great Leap Forward period was concentrated only in big cities, even after a decade of institutional expansion.]
Sun, William Huizhu. “Performing Shanghai and Beyond: An Introduction.” The Drama Review 58, 1 (March 2014): 7-8.
Tam, Kwok-kan. “Ibsen and Modern Chinese Dramatists: Influences and Parallels.” Modern Chinese Literature 2 (1986): 45-62.
Tang, Christopher. “Staging World Revolution: Crafting Internationalism in the Chinese Dramatic Arts, 1962-1968.” In Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 216-41.
Tang, Xiaobing. “Street Theater and Subject Formation in Wartime China: Toward a New Form of Public Art.” Cross-Currents no. 18 (2016).
[Abstract: Based on archival research, this article presents a succinct history of the street theater movement in China through the 1930s. It examines how complex discourses and competing visions, as well as historical events and practices—in particular the War of Resistance against Japan—both shaped and propelled the movement. The author focuses on theoretical and practical issues that promoters and practitioners of street theater dealt with and reflected on in three succeeding stages. Observing that the street theater movement hastened the formation of a modern national imagination, the author argues that the movement presented a paradigmatic development as it foregrounded the imperative to engage rural China as well as the need for participants to acquire new subject positions.]
Taylor, Jeremy. “The Sinification of Soviet Agitational Theatre: ‘Living Newspapers’ in Mao’s China [pdf].” Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies vol. 2 (July 2013).
[Abstract: The adoption and development of zhivaya gazeta (lit. ‘living newspapers’) in China follows a trajectory common to many forms of artistic expression that were introduced into that country by the Soviets in the early decades of the twentieth century. While the Soviet heritage of this theatre was at first celebrated, the Chinese Communist Party sought to tailor it to particular needs and to present it as a specifically Chinese innovation, rechristening it ‘huobaoju’.Despite dying out in the Soviet Union by the late 1920s, ‘living newspapers’ continued to be produced in China from the 1930s through until the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), with the form being employed in tandem with specific campaigns or attempts at mass mobilisation. Indeed, the very nature of Chinese communism under Mao provided the perfect environment in which this form of theatre could thrive]
Tian, Min. The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese-Western Intercultural Theatre. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2008.
[Abstract: The Poetics of Difference and Displacement is the first book in English that systematically investigates the twentieth-century Chinese-Western intercultural theatre. It demonstrates that what is central to the making of the twentieth-century Chinese-Western intercultural theatre is what the author calls the poetics of difference and displacement, which underlies its most significant aspects. With the flourish and fruition of the twentieth-century intercultural theatre, critics, theorists as well as practitioners have advanced theories and models that explicate this phenomenon, and provide critical insights and sophisticated analyses. In spite of their universalist or essentialist presumptions, the social, historical, cultural, political and ideological factors of the twentieth-century intercultural theatre are often ignored or downplayed. The Poetics of Difference and Displacement views intercultural theatre as a process of displacement and re-placement of culturally specified and differentiated theatrical forces, rejecting any universalist or essentialist presumptions. It approaches the twentieth-century Chinese-Western intercultural theatre from an aesthetic as well as a social-historic, cultural-political perspective. It examines both the Western theatre’s interpretation and interculturation of the Chinese theatre by Bertolt Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Gordon Craig, Eugenio Barba and Peter Sellars and modern Chinese theatre’s interpretation and interculturation of the Western theatre.]
Tschanz, Dietrich. “The New Drama before the New Drama: Drama Journals and Drama Reform in Shanghai before the May Fourth Movement.” Theatre InSight 10, 1 (1999): 49-59.
—–. “Where East and West Meet: Chinese Revolutionaries, French Orientalists, and Intercultural Theater in 1910s Paris.” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 4, 1 (June 2007): 98-108.
Tuan, Iris Hsin-chun. Alternative Theater in Taiwan: Feminist and Intercultural Approaches. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2007.
[Abstract: Taiwan’s historical and contemporary status as a nexus of Asian and Western cultural influences provides a rich canvas of research for the author who is uniquely trained in both Western critical and Taiwanese theatrical practices. This highly original book furnishes a creative interpretation of alternative, contemporary Taiwanese Theater by applying Feminism, Interculturalism and other western theories to three intercultural performances of four avant-garde female directors from 1993-2004. Although several important playwrights and directors have staged vital gender critiques of national and international practices, almost no critic has remarked upon them. The book’s intersection of a gender critique, and, in part, a postcolonial one, with Taiwanese stage practices is, therefore, a unique and significant contribution.]
Tung, Constantine, and Colin MacKerras, ed. Drama in the People’s Republic of China. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987.
Vittinghoff, Natascha. “China’s Generation X: Rusticated Red Guards in Controversial Contemporary Plays.” In Woei Lian Chong, ed., China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, 285-318. [discusses Sha Yexin’s New Sprouts from the Borderlands, Wang Peigong’s We, and Xun Pinli’s Yesterday’s Longan Trees]
—–. “Jiang Qing and Nora: Drama and Politics in the Republican Period.” In Mechthild Leutner and Nicola Spakowski, eds., Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective. Münster: Lit, 2005, 208-41.
Wagner, Rudolf. The Contemporary Chinese Historical Drama: Four Studies. Berkeley: UCP, 1991. [discusses Tian Han’s plays Xie Yaohuan and Guan Hanqing, among others]
—–. “Culture and Code. Historical Fiction in a Socialist Environment: The GDR and China.” In Hilary Chung, ed., In the Party Spirit. Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Editions Rodopi: Amsterdam/Atlanta 1996, 129-140. [compares historical drama in PRC and GDR]
Wang, Chun-yen. “What Does an Open Body Say? The Body and the Cold War in the Early 1980s Theater of Taiwan.” In Andrea Bachner, Howard Chiang, and Yu-lin Lee, eds., Sinoglossia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023, 55-71.
Weinstein, John B. “Multilingual Theater in Contemporary Taiwan.” Asian Theatre Journal 17, 2 (2000): 269-83. [Project Muse link]
Wilcox, Emily. “Meaning in Movement: Adaptation and the Xiqu Body in Intercultural Chinese Theatre.” The Drama Review 58, 1 (March 2014): 42-63.
—–. “Aesthetic Politics at Home and Abroad: Dagger Society and the Development of Maoist Revolutionary Dance Drama.” In Chen, Xiaomei, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, eds., Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021, 162-86.
—–. “Performance and Perfomativity in Modern China.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. NY: Routledge, 2023, 367-76.
Wu, Guanda. “Mustache as Resistance: Representation and Reception of Mei Lanfang’s Masculinity.” The Drama Review 60, 2 (Summer 2016).
Wu, Hsiao-chun. “Qi Rushan, Gewu (Song-and-Dance), and the History of Contemporary Peking Opera in Early Twentieth-Century China.” Chinoperl 36 (2017): 22-45.
[Abstract: This essay investigates the construction of the notion of gewu (song and dance) by Qi Rushan (1875–1962), main advisor to the famous performer of female roles, Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), in his writings on Chinese opera/xiqu, taking contemporary Peking opera/Jingju as its epitome. Originally put forward as a theoretical basis on which to ground the new developments in the theatrical realm that he was trying to introduce, Qi’s concept of gewu later became central to the scholarship and historical narrative of Chinese opera. This paper examines how Qi made use of the Confucian classics and pre-Song dynasty literature to invest the notion with historical depth in tracing back to antiquity the roots of the new (re-)emergence of synchronized performance of singing and dancing that he claimed was best illustrated in Mei’s plays. This article also studies Qi’s theoretical works in conjunction with the historiographical debates of the time. As such, it brings to the fore the influence of contemporary opera production and consumption on the formation of a ]new history of Chinese drama, and how the construction of a new aesthetic informed a new understanding of Chinese theatrical arts.
Xia, Xiaohong. “The Construction of the Modern Chinese Concept of Xiju (‘drama’).” In Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 52-72.
Yan, Haiping. “Male Ideology and Female Identity: Images of Women in Four Modern Chinese Historical Plays.” In Helene Keyssar, ed., Feminist Theater and Theory. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Yang, Daniel S.P. “Theater Activities in Post-Cultural Revolution China.” In C. Tung and C. Mackerras, eds., Drama in the People’s Republic of China. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987, 164-80.
Yang, Ling. “The Last Three Years.” Beijing Review 52, 7 (1979): 26.
Yeh, Catherine Vance. “Playing with the Public: Late Qing Courtesans and Their Opera Singer Lovers.” In Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds., Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, 145-68.
—–. “1925, November 9: Mei Lanfang, the Denishawn Dancers, and World Theater.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 311-19.
Yip, Terry Siu-han. “Goethe’s Impact on Modern Chinese Drama.” Modern Chinese Literature 2 (1986): 29-43.
Zhai, Yueqin. “Boundary-Crossing Experiments: Ecology of the Shanghai Avant-Garde Theater in the New Century.” Tr. Josh Stenberg. Chinese Literature Today 8, 2 (2019): 38-44.
Zhang, Aizhu. “Queer Politics, Sexual Anarchism, and Nationalism: The Chinese Male Mother and the Queer Family in He Is My Wife, He Is My Mother.” The Drama Review 58, 1 (March 2014): 89-107.
Zhang, Yu. “Visual and Theatrical Constructs of a Modern Life in the Countryside: James Yen, Xiong Foxi, and the Rural Reconstruction Movement in Ding County (1920s-1930s).” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, 1 (Spring 2013): 47-95.
Zhao, Xiaohuan. Chinese Theatre: An Illustrated History through Nuoxi and Mulianxi. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 2022.
Zheng, Yanqiu. “The Cultural Politics of Chineseness: The US Tour of Taiwan’s National Chinese Opera Theater, 1973-1974.” Twentieth-Century China 45, 1 (2020): 46-65.
[Abstract: The rise of choral singing as public performance in Shanghai during the mid-1930s was the result of overlapping historical developments and conditions. This study considers how new sound technologies, the introduction of new singing subjects as well as subject matter, and an acute sense of the nation in crisis converged to turn “community singing” into a fresh musical practice and generate a new sonic culture. Sound cinema in particular made new heroes visible as well as audible. Liu Liangmo, a secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Shanghai, was instrumental in initiating and promoting the community singing movement. His efforts, along with contributions by Lü Ji, a composer and music theorist of the cultural left, propelled the emergence of China as a “singing nation” by the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan in 1937. This process was an integral part of the cultural as well as political history of producing an articulate and audible subject against the soundscape of modernity.]
Zhongguo zuoyi xijujia lianmeng shiliao ji 中国左翼戏剧家联盟史料集 (Historical materials of the Chinese left-wing dramatists association). Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1991
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.
Zhu, Pingchao. Wartime Culture in Guilin, 1938-1944: A City at War. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.
Prose, Reportage, Biography, Autobiography
Bo, Yang. “Reportage and I.” Modern Chinese Literature 1, 2 (1985): 219-24.
Chambers, Harlan. “The ‘Liang Village Series’: Postsocialist Dynamics of Liang Hong’s Rural Investigation.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (2019): 249-292.
Chen, Xiaomei. “Genre, Convention, and Society: A Reception Study of Chinese Reportage.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 34 (1985): 85-105.
Chen, Zuyan. “‘River Elegy’ as Reportage Literature: Generic Experimentation and Boundaries.” China Information 7, 4 (1993): 20-32.
Chou, Yin-Hwa. “Formal Features of Chinese Reportage and an Analysis of Liang Qichao’s ‘Memoirs of My Travels in the New World.'” Modern Chinese Literature 1, 2 (1985): 201-18.
Croll, Elizabeth. “Gendered Moments and Inscripted Memories: Girlhood in Twentieth-century Chinese Autobiography.” In Selma Leydesdorff, Luisa Passerini, and Paul Thompson, eds., Gender and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 117-32.
Guo, Jie. “Reportage, Ethnicity, and Feminine Subjectivities: Ai Wu’s Journey to the South and Its ‘Sequels’.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (2019): 1-40.
Guo, Li. “From the Margins to the Hearth: A Study of Xu Gang’s Environmental Reportage.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (2019): 162-206.
Howard, Richard. “Modern Chinese Biographical Writing.” Journal of Asian Studies 21, 4 (1962): 465-75.
Huichung, Emily Chua. “The Good Book and the Good Life: Bestselling Biographies in China’s Economic Reform.” The China Quarterly 198 (2009): 364-380.
Larson, Wendy. Literary Authority and the Chinese Writer: Ambivalence and Autobiography. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Laughlin, Charles. “Estrangement from the Art of Fact: The Fate of Reportage in a Changing China.” China Exchange News 21, 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1993): 20-22.
—–. Narrating the Nation: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience in Chinese Reportage, 1919-1966. Ph.D. diss. NY: Columbia University, 1996.
—–. “Narrative Subjectivity and the Production of Social Space in Chinese Reportage.” Boundary 2. Special Issue ed. Rey Chow. 25, 2 (Fall 1998): 25-46. Rpt. in Rey Chow, ed. Modern Chinese Literary Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.
—–. “Incongruous Lyricism: Liu Baiyu, Yang Shuo and sanwen in Chinese Socialist Culture.” In Martin Woesler, ed., The Modern Chinese Literary Essay: Defining the Chinese Self in the 20th Century. Bochum: Bochum UP, 2000, 115-29.
—–. Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. [MCLC Resource Center Publication review by Susan Daruvala]
—–. The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. [MCLC Resource Center review by John A. Crespi]
[Abstract: The Chinese essay is arguably China’s most distinctive contribution to modern world literature, and the period of its greatest influence and popularity–the mid-1930s–is the central concern of this book. What Laughlin terms “the literature of leisure” is a modern literary response to the cultural past that manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of short, informal essay writing (xiaopin wen). Laughlin examines the essay both as a widely practiced and influential genre of literary expression and as an important counter-discourse to the revolutionary tradition of New Literature (especially realistic fiction), often viewed as the dominant mode of literature at the time. After articulating the relationship between the premodern traditions of leisure literature and the modern essay, Laughlin treats the various essay styles representing different groups of writers. Each is characterized according to a single defining activity: “wandering” in the case of the Yu si (Threads of Conversation) group surrounding Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren; “learning” with the White Horse Lake group of Zhejiang schoolteachers like Feng Zikai and Xia Mianzun; “enjoying” in the case of Lin Yutang’s Analects group; “dreaming” with the Beijing school. The concluding chapter outlines the impact of leisure literature on Chinese culture up to the present day. The book dramatizes the vast importance and unique nature of creative nonfiction prose writing in modern China. It will be eagerly read by those with an interest in twentieth-century Chinese literature, modern China, and East Asian or world literatures.]
—–. “Writing the Actual.” In Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 135–48.
—–. “1936, May 21: One Day in China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 420-26.
—–. “Mapping the Third World: Chinese Reportage on Developing Countries in the 1950s and 1960s.” Chinese Literature Today 8, 2 (2019): 108-119.
—–. “Images of Aging and the Aesthetic of Actuality in Chinese Film: Reportage, Documentary, and the Art of the Real.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (2019): 207-248.
—–. “Reportage and the Forms of Nonfiction Art in China.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 185-95.
Laughlin, Charles and Li Guo. “Reportage and Its Contemporary Variations: An Introduction.” Special issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, 2 (Fall 2019): v-xvi.
Li, Xia. “Perilous Journeys and Archetypal Encounters: Critical Observations on Chinese Travel Literature.” Neohelicon 28, 1 (2001): 247-260.
Mangalagiri, Adhira. “A Poetics of the Writers’ Conference: Literary Relation in the Cold War World.” Comparative Literature Studies 58, 3 (2021): 509-531.
[Abstract: This article offers a poetics of the writers’ conference as conducted via channels of Cold War–era cultural diplomacy through a reading of the Asian Writers’ Conference (New Delhi, 1956), a largely forgotten predecessor of the better-known Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences. Focusing particularly on the Chinese writers in attendance, I read the conference literarily, with an eye to its aesthetics and the particular performance of transnational literary relation that it engendered. The Conference’s fortuitous confluence with the Hundred Flowers Campaign in China unexpectedly made possible an approach to transnational literary exchange that actively eschewed and rebelled against state intervention in the literary sphere. As such, the Asian Writers’ Conference effected a form of transnational literary relation that thrived in its self-avowed uselessness to mandates of diplomacy. The Conference warns against the tendency in South–South studies to valorize the decentering of colonial powers as cultural mediators without a critical engagement with the nation-state’s overseeing presence once it occupies that agential role in transnational literary exchange.]
Moran, Thomas. True Stories: Contemporary Chinese Reportage and Its Ideology and Aesthetic. Ph.D. diss. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1994.
Pollard, David. “Introduction.” In Pollard, ed., The Chinese Essay. NY: Columbia UP, 2000, 1-24.
Scoggin, Mary Louise. Ethnography of a Chinese Essay: Zawen in Contemporary China. Ph.D. diss. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997.
—–. “Mulish Essays: The Genre of Zawen in Contemporary China.” In Martin Woesler, ed., The Modern Chinese Literary Essay: Defining the Chinese Self in the 20th Century. Bochum: Bochum UP, 2000, 189-205.
Tam, King-fai. “Discussion of this Chapter: The xiaopin wen between xianshi sanwen and zawen.” In Martin Woesler, ed., The Modern Chinese Literary Essay: Defining the Chinese Self in the 20th Century. Bochum: Bochum UP, 2000, 239-41.
Wagner, Rudolf. Inside the Service Trade: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1992. [focuses primarily on reportage of the 50s and 80s]
Wagner, Alexandra R. Bildnisse des Selbst: die Neumondschule und der moderne chinesische Essay (Images of self: the Crescent Moon Society and the Chinese Essay). Dortmund: Projekt Verlag, 1996.
—–. “Tradition as Construct and the Search for a Modern Identity: A Reading of Traditional Gestures in Modern Chinese Essays of Place.” In Martin Woesler, ed., The Modern Chinese Literary Essay: Defining the Chinese Self in the 20th Century. Bochum: Bochum UP, 2000, 133-46. [deals with Yu Dafu, Zhu Ziqing, and Fang Lingru]
Wang, Ban. “From Historical Narrative to the World of Prose: The Essayistic Mode in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” In Martin Woesler, ed., The Modern Chinese Literary Essay: Defining the Chinese Self in the 20th Century. Bochum: Bochum UP, 2000, 173-88.
Wang, Jing M. When “I” Was Born: Women’s Autobiography in Modern China. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.
[Abstract: In the period between the 1920s and 1940s, a genre emerged in Chinese literature that would reveal crucial contradictions in Chinese culture that still exist today. At a time of intense political conflict, Chinese women began to write autobiography, a genre that focused on personal identity and self-exploration rather than the national, collective identity that the country was championing. The author seeks to reclaim the voices of these particular writers, voices that have been misinterpreted and overlooked for decades. Tracing women writers as they move from autobiographical fiction, often self-revelatory and personal, to explicit autobiographies that focused on women’s roles in public life, Jing M. Wang reveals the factors that propelled this literary movement, the roles that liberal translators and their renditions of Western life stories played, and the way in which these women writers redefined writing and gender in the stories they told. But Wang reveals another story as well: the evolving history and identity of women in modern Chinese society. When “I” Was Born adds to a growing body of important work in Chinese history and culture, women’s studies, and autobiography in a global context. Writers discussed include Xie Bingying, Zhang Ailing, Yu Yinzi, Fei Pu, Lu Meiyen, Feng Heyi, Ye Qian, Bai Wei, Shi Wen, Fan Xiulin, Su Xuelin, and LuYin.]
Wang, Jing M. Strategies of Modern Chinese Women Writers’ Autobiographies. Ph. D. diss. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 2000.
Wang, Lingzhen. Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
Wedell-Wedellsborg, Anne. “Confronting Time: Aspects of Temporality in some Recent Chinese Prose.” 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, 175-91.
Williams, Philip F. C. “Twentieth-Century Prose.” In Victor H. Mair, ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2001, 566-75.
Woesler, Martin.. Geschicte des chinesischen Essays in Moderne und Gegenwart (History of the Chinese essay in modern and contemporary times). Bochum: Multilingual, 1998.
—–. “Introduction: Naming the Unknown Land of the Essay.” In Woesler, 20th Century Chinese Essays in Translation. Bochum: Bochum UP, 2000, xv-xlii.
—–. “The 20th Century Chinese Essay — Characteristics, Actors, and Trends.” In Martin Woesler, ed., The Modern Chinese Literary Essay: Defining the Chinese Self in the 20th Century. Bochum: Bochum UP, 2000, 293-310.
—–, ed. The Modern Chinese Literary Essay – Defining the Chinese Self in the 20th Century. Bochum: Bochum University Press, 2000.
Xiong, Ying. “Knowing the World and Educating the Self: Reportage in Chinese Left-Wing Culture in 1936.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 35, 2 (Winter 2023): 322-53.
Zhang, Yingjin. “Narrative, Ideology, Subjectivity: Defining a Subversive Discourse in Chinese Reportage.” In Xiaobin Tang and Kang Liu, eds. Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, 211-41.
—–. “Perseverance through Aftershocks: Epistephilia in Chinese Reportage and Independent Documentary.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21,2 (2019): 129-161.
Literary Criticism
Anderson, Marsten. The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period. Berkeley: UCP, 1990. [see especially pp 27-75 for discussion of theories of realism in China]
Cai, Zong-qi. “The Rethinking of Emotion: The Transformation of Traditional Chinese Literary Criticism in the Late Qing Era.” Monumenta Serica 45 (1997).
Chen, Jianhua. “Canon Formation and the Linguistic Turn: Literary Debates in Republican China.” In Kai-wing Chow, Tze-ki Hon, Hung-yok Ip, and Don Price, eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.
Chen, Ya-chen. “French Feminist Theories in Wenyi lilun of the 1990s.” Feminismo/s 3 (2004): 235-260. [Abstract]
Cheng, Gek Nai. “A Comparison Between Chinese and Western Fiction by Late Ch’ing Critics.” Chinese Culture 29, 3 (1988): 81-88.
Chong, Woei Lien. “The Tragic Duality of Man: Lin Xiaobo on Western Philosophy.” In Kurt Ladtke and Tony Saich, eds., China’s Modernisation: Westernisation and Acculturation. Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1993, 111-62.
Davies, Gloria . Worrying About China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. [HUP blurb]
Denton, Kirk A., ed. Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.
Dolezelova-Velingerova, Milena. “Literary Historiography in Early Twentieth-Century China (1904-1928): Construction of Cultural Memory.” In Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001, 123-66.
Edwards, Louise. “Consolidating a Socialist Patriarchy: The Women’s Writers’ Industry and ‘Feminist’ Literary Criticism.” In Antonia Finnan and Ann McLaren, eds. Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture. Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1999, 183-97.
Fokkema, D.W. Literary Doctrine in China and Soviet Influence, 1956-60. Hague: Mouton, 1965.
Galik, Marian. Mao Dun and Modern Chinese Literary Criticism. Weisbaden: Verner Steiner, 1969.
—–. The Genesis of Modern Chinese Liteary Criticism (1917-1930). London: Curzon Press, 1980.
—–. “Teng Chung-hsia, Yun Tai-ying, Hsiao Ch’u-nu and the Beginning of Concerned Literary Criticism.” In Galik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism, 1917-1930. London: Curzon Press, 1980, 129-41.
—–. “The Comparative Aspects of the Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism.” In Ying-hsiung Chou, ed., The Chinese Text: Studies in Comparative Literature. HK: CUP, 1986, 177-90.
Hsia, C.T. “Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao as Advocates of New Fiction.” In A. Rickett, ed., Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang Ch’i-ch’ao. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.
Hu, Xiaoming. “Shifting Chinese Literary Theory: On the Recent Ideological Trend of “Counter-West Centralism” in Chinese Literary Theory Research.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 1, 1 (Feb. 2007): 135-61.
Huters, Theodore. “From Writing to Literature: The Development of Late Qing Theories of Prose.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47, 1 (1987): 50-96.
—–. “A New Way of Writing: The Possibility for Literature in Late Qing China, 1895-1908.” Modern China 14, 3 (1988): 243-76.
—–. “Chinese Theory and Criticism: Twentieth Century” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994, 155-60.
Kubin, W. and R. Wagner, eds. Essays in Modern Chinese Literature and Literary Criticism. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1982.
Lee, Mabel. “Liang Ch’i-ch’ao (1873-1929) and the Literary Revolution of the Late Ch’ing.” In A.R. Davis, ed., Search for Identity: Modern Literature and Creative Arts in Asia. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1974.
—–. “Rethinking Literature in the Post-Mao Period: Liu Zaifu on the Subjectivity of Literature.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 18/19 (1986/87): 101-25.
—–. “Walking Out of Other People’s Prisions: Liu Zaifu and Gao Xingjian.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 5, 3 (1996): 98-112.
Li, Tuo. “Resistance to Modernity—Reflections on China’s Literary Criticism in the 1980s.” Trs. Marshall McArthur and Han Chen. In Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang and Michelle Yeh, eds., Contemporary Chinese Literature: Crossing the Boundaries. Special issue of Literature East and West. Austin, TX: Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, 1995, 127-35. Rpt in Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds.,Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 137-45.
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.
Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity– China, 1900-1937. Stanford: SUP, 1995. [contains two chapters on literary criticism and canonicity]
Liu, Zaifu. “Farewell to the Gods: Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory’s Fin-de-siecle Struggle.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 1-13.
McDougall, Bonnie. The Introduction of Western Literary Theories in to Modern China, 1919-1925. Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971.
Miller, Lucien. “Allegory and Personality in Modern Chinese Literary Criticism: Chou Tso-jen and Wang Kuo-wei.” Tamkang Review 9, 4 (1979): 379-406.
Mu, Ling. “Beyond the ‘Theory of Language Games’: Huang Ziping and Chinese Literary Criticism of the 1980s.” MC 21, 4 (1995): 420-49.
Owen, Stephen. “The End of the Past: Rewriting Chinese Literary History in the Early Republic.” In Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001, 167-92.
Pickowicz, Paul. Marxist Literary Thought and China: A Conceptual Framework. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1980.
—–. Marxist Literary Thought in China: The Influence of Ch’u Ch’iu-p’ai. Berkeley: UCP, 1981.
Pollard, David. A Chinese Look at Literature: The Literary Values of Chou Tso-jen in Relation to the Tradition. London: C. Hurst, 1973.
Roberts, Rosemary. “Women’s Studies in Literature and Feminist Literary Criticism in Contemporary China.” In Antonia Finnane and Ann McLaren, eds., Dress, Sex, and Text in Chinese Culture. Clayton, AUS: Monash Asia Institute, 1999, 225-40.
Qian, Liqun. “Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren: A Comparative Study of the Evolution of their Literary Views.” Social Sciences in China 3 (1984): 123-46.
—–. “An Overview of Chinese Theories of Fiction from the 1940s.” Tr. Stephen Day. MCL 9, 1 (Spring 1995): 59-78.
Rickett, Adele. Wang Kuo-wei’s “Jen-chien tz’u-hua”: a Study in Chinese Literary Criticism. HK: HKUP, 1977.
—–, ed. Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang Ch’i-ch’ao. Princeton: PUP, 1978.
Roberts, Rosemary. “Women’s Studies in Literature and Feminist Literary Criticism in Contemporary China.” In Antonia Finnan and Ann McLaren, eds. Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture. Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1999, 225-40.
Sung, Mei-hwa. “Writing Women’s Literary History: Gender Discourse and Women’s Literature in Taiwan.” 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, 171-92.
Tang, Xiaobin. “Orientalism and the Question of Universality: The Language of Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory.” positions 1, 2 (Fall 1993).
Tagore, Amintendranath. Literary Debates in China, 1918-1937. Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1967.
Wedell-Wedellsborg, Anne. “The Ambivalent Role of the Chinese Literary Critic in the 1980s.” In Larson, Wendy, and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds. Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1993, 134-52.
Widmer, Ellen. “The Rhetoric of Retrospection: May Fourth Literary History and the Ming-Qing Woman Writer.” In Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001, 193-227.
Wang, Fangzhen. “Marxist Literary Criticism in China.” In Cory Nelson and Laurence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988, 715-22.
Wang, Yichuan. “Modern Characteristics in Modern Chinese Literary Theory.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 4, 1 (March 2010): 19-31.
Wen, Ruimin. “A Review of the Modern Literary Studies in the 1980s from the Perspective of the Disciplinary History.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 1, 2 (May 2007): 250-71.
Wong, Wang-chi. Politics and Literature In Shanghai: the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930-1936. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991.
Xu, Ben. “Postmodern-Postcolonial Criticism and Pro-Democracy Enlightenment.” Modern China 27, 1 (January 2001): 17-147.
Yue, Daiyun. “On Western Literary Theory in China.” Tr.Gloria Davies. In Gloria Davies, ed. Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied, 2001, 109-22.
Zhang, Yingjin. “Building a National Literature in Modern China: Literary Criticism, Gender Ideology, and the Public Sphere.” Jorunal of Modern Literature in Chinese 1, 1 (1997): 47-74.
Zhou, Xian. “Literary Theory, Theory, and Post-theory.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 4, 1 (March 2010): 1-18.