| Histories | Late Qing | May Fourth | Post-May Fourth | War and Postwar Period | 1950s-1960s | Cultural Revolution | Post-Mao | Post-1989/Postsocialist |
Histories
Bady, Paul. La littérature chinoise moderne. Paris: Press Universitaire de France (PUF), 1993.
Birch, Cyril. “Literature under Communism.” In Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol 15: The People’s Republic of China, pt. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 270-328.
Cai, Zong-qi and Stephen Roddy, eds. The Western Reinvention of Chinese Literature, 1910-2010: From Ezra Pound to Maxine Hong Kingston. Leiden: Brill, 2022.
[Abstract: During much of China’s tumultuous 20th century, May 4th and Maoist iconoclasts regarded their classical literary heritage as a burden to be dislodged in the quest for modernization. This volume demonstrates how the traditions that had deeply impressed earlier generations of Western writers like Goethe and Voltaire did not lose their lustre; to the contrary, a fascination with these past riches sprouted with renewed vigour among Euro-American poets, novelists, and other cultural figures after the fall of imperial China in 1911. From Petrograd to Paris, and from São Paolo to San Francisco, China’s premodern poetry, theatre, essays, and fiction inspired numerous prominent writers and intellectuals. The contributors survey the fruits of this engagement in multiple Western languages and nations.]
Chang, Kang-yi Sun and Stephen Owen. The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, Volume II: From 1375. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Chen, Jack W., Anatoly Detwyler, Xiao Liu, Christopher M. B. Nugent, and Bruce Rusk, eds., Literary Information in China: A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Victor Mair]
Chen Sihe 陈思和. Zhongguo dangdai wenxue shi jiaocheng 中国当代文学史教程 (Lectures on contemporary Chinese literature). Shanghai: Fudan daxue, 1999.
Chen, Yu-chin. “Writers and 50 Years of Chinese Communism.” The Chinese Pen (Autumn 1972): 21-41.
Denton, Kirk A., ed. The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. [MCLC Resource Center review by Edward Gunn]
[Abstract: More than 50 short essays centered on specific writers and literary trends create an engaging and easily digestible history of Chinese literature from the Qing period (1895–1911) to today. The essays in this volume can be read sequentially for a chronological account or separately in conjunction with reading the literary works in Chinese or English-language translation. Each entry features author names and titles, as well as key terms and references, in English and in Chinese characters for readers who know or are learning Chinese, and each concludes with a bibliography of relevant primary and secondary sources. The volume opens with eight thematic essays addressing general issues in the study of Chinese literature: the ethics of writing a literary history, the formation of the canon, the relationship between language and form, the influence of literary institutions and communities, the effects of censorship, and the role of different media on the development of literature. Subsequent essays focus on authors, their works, and their schools, with entries on Wang Anyi, Eileen Chang, Shen Congwen, Yu Dafu, Mao Dun, Xiao Hong, Yang Jiang, Ba Jin, Yan Lianke, Ding Ling, Liang Qichao, Lao She, Wang Shuo, Zhu Tianwen, Zhu Tianxin, Xi Xi, Gao Xingjian, Lu Xun, Mo Yan, and Qian Zhongshu. Woven throughout are more general pieces on late Qing fiction, popular entertainment fiction, martial arts fiction, experimental theater, post-Mao avant-garde poetry in China, post–martial law fiction from Taiwan, contemporary genre fiction from China, and recent Internet literature, among other topics.]
—–. “Historical Overview.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 3-26
Dolezalova, Anna. “Periodization of Modern Chinese Literature.” Asian and African Studies (Bratislava) 14 (1978): 27-32.
—–. “Suggestions Regarding Periodization of Liteature in the People’s Republic of China.” Asian and African Studies (Bratislava) 16 (1980): 153-59.
The Giants Within: A Portrait of Chinese Writers. 13 part video tapes. Taibei: Spring International, 1998.
Giafferri-Huang, Xiaomin. Le roman chinois depuis 1949. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991.
Guo Tingli 郭延礼. Zhongguo jindai wenxue fazhan shi 中国近代文学发展史 (History of the development of modern Chinese literature). 3 vols. Ji’nan: Shandong jiaoyu, 1990. [vol. 1, 1840-1873; vol 2, 1873-1905; vol. 3, 1905-1919]
Herdan, Innes. The Pen and the Sword: Literature and Revolution in Modern China. London: Red Books, 1992.
Hong, Zicheng. A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Tr. Michael Day. Brill, 2007.
[Abstract: This groundbreaking book by the eminent Peking University professor Hong Zicheng covers the literary scene in China during the 1949-1999 period, primarily focusing on fiction, poetry, drama, and prose writing. Reprinted sixteen times since its publication in the PRC in 1999 it is now available in English translation at last. The first section of the book deals with the 1949-1976 period. Often derided and ignored as an arid era for literature by both Chinese and overseas critics, Professor Hong describes the literature that was popular and officially acceptable at the time, and the cultural policies and political campaigns that shaped the tastes of readers and the literary creativity of writers during the period. This part of the book is remarkable for Professor Hong’s candidness and open-mindedness, qualities that would have made this text difficult to publish at an earlier date in China. Furthermore, the platform that the first part of the text provides renders the second part even more understandable to readers unfamiliar with the post-1976 literary scene – and offers new insights to those who are familiar with it – demonstrating as it does the close links between the two distinctive eras. These links are provided by the resumption of literary traditions that had been more-or-less abandoned during the preceding ten-year period, as well as reactions against literature nurtured and guided by the state cultural apparatus. The second part of the book consists of a comprehensive description of developments – and insightful explanations of those developments – in the literary arts and literary criticism since 1976.]
Hsia, C. T. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961, second edition, 1971. Third edition: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Huang, Nicole. “War, Revolution, and Urban Transformations: Chinese Literature of the Republican Era, 1920s-1940s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chicester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 67-80.
Lai, Ming. A History of Chinese Literature. W/preface by Lin Yutang. NY: Capricorn Books, 1964. [pp. 346-400 deal with modern literature]
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “Literary Trends I: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927.” In The Cambridge History of China. Fairbank and Feuerwerker, eds. Cambridge UP, 1989, 12: 452-504
—–. “Literary Trends II: The Road to Revolution, 1927-1949.” In The Cambridge History of China. Fairbank and Feuerwerker, eds. Cambridge University Press, 1989, 13: 421-491.
Li, Sher-shiueh. “The Multiple Beginnings of Modern Chinese ‘Literature.'” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 29-34.
Louie, Kam and Bonnie McDougall. The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century. NY: Columbia UP, 1997.
McDougall, Bonnie S. “Chinese Literature, 1900 to the Present.” The Literary Encyclopedia. The Literary Dictionary Company, 2007.
Monsterleet, Jean. Sommets de la litterature chinoise contemporaine. Paris: Editions Domat, 1953.
[includes a general overview of the literary renaissance from 1917-1950, as well as sections on Novel (with chapters on Ba Jin, Mao Dun, Lao She and Shen Congwen), Stories and Essays (with chapters on Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Bing Xin, and Su Xuelin), Theater (Cao Yu, Guo Moruo), and Poetry (Xu Zhimo, Wen Yiduo, Bian Zhilin, Feng Zhi, and Ai Qing).]
Nienhauser, William and Howard Goldblatt. “Modern Chinese Literature.” Britannica.com.
Rojas, Carlos and Andrea Bachner, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Scott, A.C. Literature and the Arts in Twentieth Century China. NY: Doubleday, 1963.
Spence, Jonathan. 1981. The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution 1895-1980. New York: The Viking Press.
Su, Hsueh-lin. “Present Day Fiction and Drama in China.” In Joseph Schyns, ed., 1500 Modern Chinese Novels and Plays. Beiping (Peiping): 1948.
Tang, Tao. History of Modern Chinese Literature. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1993.
Ting, Yi. A Short History of Modern Chinese Literature. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1959.
Wang, David Der-Wei, ed. A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Wu, Fuhui. A Cultural History of Modern Chinese Literature. Tr. Rui (Myra) Ma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Thomas Moran]
Yang Yi 杨义. Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo shi 中国现代小说史 (History of modern Chinese fiction). 3 vols. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1986-98.
Xie, Mian. The Ideological Transformation of 20th Century Chinese Literature. Beijing: Enrich Professional, 2015.
[Abstract: The 20th century was an era of tremendous changes for Chinese society, and these changes shaped the development of Chinese literature as revealed in The Ideological Transformation of 20th Century Chinese Literature. Rulers in the late-Qing dynasty era were subjected to unwilling reforms which saw the abolition of the “eight-legged” essays and the imperial examination as these had notoriously restricted the thinking of the Chinese literati. Shortly after the fall of the Qing, leaders of the New Culture Movement started to promote vernacular literature, stressed the need for a re-examination of the ancient classics, and championed the popularization of Western values. After that, Chinese literature was taken on a completely different trajectory, not only in stylistic terms but also in ideological ones. The Ideological Transformation of 20th Century Chinese Literature is the fruit of poet and critic Xie Mian’s decades-long study of contemporary Chinese literature during his earlier years as a professor at Peking University. Grouped thematically and in accordance with the periods in discussion, this collection of nearly 50 essays provides an integrated examination of the historical backdrop and ideologies that underpinned Chinese literature from the days of the New Culture Movement to the New Era beyond the Cultural Revolution through a mix of microscopic criticisms and macroscopic overviews.]
Xiong, Yuezhi. Shanghai Urban Life and Its Heterogeneous Cultural Entanglements. Trs. Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. Leiden: Brill, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Andrea Janku].
Zhang, Yinde. Le roman chinois moderne 1918-1949. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992
Zhang, Yingjin, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016.
[Abstract: This wide-ranging Companion provides a vital overview of modern Chinese literature in different geopolitical areas, from the 1840s to now. It reviews major accomplishments of Chinese literary scholarship published in Chinese and English and brings attention to previously neglected, important areas. Offers the most thorough and concise coverage of modern Chinese literature to date, drawing attention to previously neglected areas such as late Qing, Sinophone, and ethnic minority literature. Several chapters explore literature in relation to Sinophone geopolitics, regional culture, urban culture, visual culture, print media, and new media. The introduction and two chapters furnish overviews of the institutional development of modern Chinese literature in Chinese and English scholarship since the mid-twentieth century. Contributions from leading literary scholars in mainland China and Hong Kong add their voices to international scholarship.]
—–. A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023.
[Abstract: Providing a broad introduction to the area, A World History of Chinese Literature maps the field of Chinese literature across its various worlds, looking both within – at the world of Chinese literature, its history, linguistic, cultural, local, and regional specificities – and without – at the way Chinese literature has circulated throughout the world. The thematic focus allows for a broad number of key categories, such as authors, genres, genders, regions, as well as innovative explorations of new topics and issues such as inter-arts performativity and transmediation. The sections cover the circulation and reception of China in world literature, as well as the worlds of: (1) Chinese literature across the globe; (2) Borders, oceans, and rainforests; (3) Comparative literary genres ; (4) Translingual writers and scholars; (5) Gender configurations; (6) Translation and transmediation. With a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection intervenes in current debates on global Chinese literature, Sinophone and Sinoscript studies, and the production and reception of literary works by ethnic Chinese in non-Sinitic languages, as well as Anglophone literature inspired by Chinese literary tradition. It will be of interest to anyone working on or studying Chinese literature, language and culture, as well as world literatures in relation to China.]
—–. “General Introduction.” In Yingjin Zhang, A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 3-21.
Late Qing (1895-1911)
A Ying 阿英. WanQing wenxue congchao 晚清文学丛抄 (Compendium of late Qing literature). Beijing Zhonghua shuju, 1962.
—–. WanQing xiaoshuo shi 晚清小说史 (History of late Qing fiction). Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi, 2009.
Andolfatto, Lorenzo. Hundred Days’ Literature: Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902-1910. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
[Abstract: Andolfatto explores the landscape of early modern Chinese fiction through the lens of the utopian novel, casting new light on some of its most peculiar yet often overshadowed literary specimens. The wutuobang or lixiang xiaoshuo, by virtue of its ideally totalizing perspective, provides a one-of-a-kind critical tool for the understanding of late imperial China’s fragmented Zeitgeist. Building upon rigorous close reading and solid theoretical foundations, Hundred Days’ Literature offers the reader a transcultural critical itinerary that links Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward to Wu Jianren’s Xin Shitou ji via the writings of Liang Qichao, Chen Tianhua, Bihe Guanzhuren, and Lu Shi’e. The book also includes the first English translation of Cai Yuanpei’s short story “New Year’s Dream.”]
—–. “Futures Enmired in History: Chun Fan’s Weilai shijie (1907), Biheguan Zhuren’s Xin jiyuan (1908) and the Limits of Looking Backward.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 40 (2019): 107-124.
Andrs, Dusan. Formulation of Fictionality: Discourse on Fiction in China between 1904 and 1915. Ph.d. Diss. Prague: Charles University, 2000.
Anonymous. “The New Novel Before the New Novel: John Fryer’s Fiction Contest.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 317-40.
Bachner, Andrea. “1899: Oracle Bones, The Dangerous Supplement.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 156-61.
Benedetti, Lavinia. “Killing Di Gong: Rethinking Van Gulik’s Translation Of Late Qing Dynasty Novel Wu Zetian Si Da Qi’an [武則天四大奇案].” Ming Qing Studies (2014): 11-42.
—–. “The Political Aspect of Misogynies in Late Qing Dynasty Crime Fiction.” Journal of Literature and Art Studies 6, 4 (2016): 340-55.
Blitstein, Pablo Ariel. “From ‘Ornament’ to ‘Literature’: An Uncertain Substitution in Nineteenth-Twentieth Century China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, 1 (Spring 2016): 222-272.
Boittout, Joachim. The Forgotten 1910s 尋找辛亥文風. (A blog on “literature and democracy in early Republican China 民國初年言情文學與民主建設”).
[Abstract: This website is conceived as a translation platform for long ignored literary pieces of the early 1910s. Its main purpose is to provide China focused scholars and students with a representative selection of famous literary works of that time, which covers the end of the Qing empire and the first years of the Republican era. Most of the pieces translated here were written in Classical Chinese, usually in the elite form of pianwen 駢文 (paralleled prose), and serialized in political newspapers such as People’s Rights (Minquanbao 民權報, 1912-1914). It focusses on “early Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” (1912-1918) writers. This group, contrary to others novelists and writers often conveniently gathered under the deceptive label “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies,” manifested and claimed a sense of unity. Acting as leading figures of this group were Xu Zhenya 徐枕亞 (1889-1937), Wu Shuangre 吳雙熱 (1885-1934), Xu Tianxiao 徐天嘯 (1886-1941), Li Dingyi 李定夷 (1890-1963), and Liu Tieleng 劉鐵冷 (1881-1961).]
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.]
Chan, Kwok Kou Leonard. “1905, January 6: Wen and the ‘First History(ies) of Chinese Literature.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017, 190-95.
Chan, Leo Tak-hung. “Liberal Versions: Late Qing Approaches to Translating Aesop’s Fables.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdan, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 57-78.
Chang, Hao. Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning, 1890-1911. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Chen, Dakeng. “The Price of Novels in the Late Qing Dynasty.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 1, 1 (Feb. 2007): 125-34.
Chen, Jianhua. “The Late Qing Poetry Revolution: Liang Qichao, Huang Zunxian, and Chinese Literary Modernity.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 333-40. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 89-96.
—–. “Zhou Shoujuan’s Love Stories and Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly Fiction.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 354-63. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 111-20.
Chen, Liana. “The Empress Dowager as Dramaturg: Reinventing Late-Qing Court Theatre.” Nannu: Men, Women and Gender in China 14, 1 (2012): 21-46.
Chen, Pingyuan 陈平原. “The Modern Transition of Chinese Novel.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 2, 1 (Feb. 2002): 44- 67.
—–. Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo de qidian: Qingmo Minchu xiaoshuo yanjiu 中国现代小说的起点: 清末民初小说研究 (The starting point for modern Chinese fiction: studies in late Qing and early Republican fiction). Beijing: Beijing daxue, 2005.
Cheng, Stephen. Flowers of Shanghai and the Late Qing Courtesan Novel. Ph. D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1979.
Chin, Carol C. “Translating the New Woman: Chinese Feminists View of the West, 1905-1915.” Gender and History 18, 5 (Nov. 2006): 490-518.
Chow, Kai-wing. “Imagining Boundaries of Blood: Zhang Binglin and the Invention of the Han ‘Race’ in Modern China.” In Frank Dikotter, ed., The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. London: Hurst, 1997, 34-52.
Denton, Kirk A. “Introduction.” In Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996, 1-61.
Des Forges, Alexander. Street Talk and Alley Stories: Tangled Narratives of Shanghai from Lives of Shanghai Flowers (1892) to Midnight (1933). Ph.D. diss. Princeton: Princeton University, 1998.
—–. “From Source Texts to ‘Reality Observed’: The Creation of the ‘Author’ in Nineteenth-Century Vernacular Fiction.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles and Reviews 22 (2000): 67-84.
—–. “The Uses of Fiction: Liang Qichao and His Contemporaries.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 341-47. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 97-103.
—–. “Building Shanghai, One Page at a Time: The Aesthetics of Installment Fiction at the Turn of the Century.” The Journal of Asian Studies 62, 3 (Aug. 2003): 781-810.
—–. Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Chris Berry]
—–. “Professional Anxiety, Brand Names, and Wild Chickens: From 1909.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, eds., Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon. NY: Routledge, 2009, 40-53.
—–. “1890, Fall: Lives of Shanghai Flowers, Dialect Fiction and the Genesis of Vernacular Modernity.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 133-39.
—–. Testing the Literary: Prose and the Aesthetic in Early Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2021.
[Abstract: The civil service examination essay known as shiwen (modern or contemporary prose) or bagu wen (eight-legged essay) for its complex structure was the most widely read and written literary genre in early modern China (1450–1850). As the primary mode of expression in which educated individuals were schooled, shiwen epitomized the literary enterprise even beyond the walls of the examination compound. But shiwen suffered condemnation in the shift in discourse on literary writing that followed the fall of the Ming dynasty, and were thoroughly rejected in the May Fourth iconoclasm of the early twentieth century. Challenging conventional disregard for the genre, Des Forges reads the examination essay from a literary perspective, showing how shiwen redefined prose aesthetics and transformed the work of writing. A new approach to subjectivity took shape: the question “who is speaking?” resonated through the essays’ involuted prose style, foregrounding issues of agency and control. At the same time, the anonymity of the bureaucratic evaluation process highlighted originality as a literary value. Finally, an emphasis on questions of form marked the aesthetic as a key arena for contestation of authority as candidates, examiners, and critics joined to form a dominant social class of literary producers.]
Dolezelova-Velingerova, Milena. “The Origins of Modern Chinese Literature.” In Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977, 17-36.
—–, ed. The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980.
—–. “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.
—–. “Fiction from the End of the Empire to the Beginning of the Republic (1897-1916).” In Victor H. Mair, ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2001, 697-731.
—— and Rudolf Wagner, eds. Chinese Encyclopaedias of New Global Knowledge (1870-1930). Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2014.
Drunken Whiskers. That Chinese Woman: The Life of Sai-Chin-Hua. Tr. Henry McAleavy. London: Allen and Unwin, 1959; New York: Crowell 1959.
Elman, Benjamin. “Gongyang Imaginary and Looking to the Confucian Past for Reform.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 62-69.
Feng, Jin. The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2004. [“Introduction to The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction.” Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6, 4 (Dec. 2004).]
—–. “The Great (Surrogate) Mother of the West: The Genealogy of Masculinity in Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America.” Tamkang Review XXXV, 1 (Autumn 2004): 57-78.
Fogel, Joshua and Peter Zarrow, eds. Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890-1920. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997.
Fong, Grace S., Nanxiu Qian, and Harriet Zurndorfer, eds., “Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China.” Special issue of Nan Nu: Men, Women, and Gender in China6, 1 (2004).
Furth, Charlotte . “Intellectual Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895-1920.” In Merle Goldman an Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds., An Intellectual History of Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 13-96.
Gimpel, Denise. “A Neglected Medium: The Literary Journal and the Case of The Short Story Magazine (Xiaoshuo yuebao), 1910-1914.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, 2 (Fall 1999): 53-106.
—–. Lost Voices of Modernity: A Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.
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.
Guan, Aihe. “The Traditional and Modern Conflicts of the Literary Innovation at the Threshold of the 20th Century.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 2, 4 (Dec. 2008): 583-98.
Guo, Li. “Hybrid Subjects, Fluid Bodies: Envisioning the Early Modern Queer in Phoenixes Flying Together.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 18, 1 (March 2021): 27-48.
[Abstract: This essay offers a study of male homoeroticism in an unconventional and yet seminal nineteenth-century woman-authored tanci work, Fengshuangfei 鳳雙飛 (Phoenixes Flying Together; preface dated 1899) by Cheng Huiying 程蕙英 (before 1859–after 1899). Perhaps the only tanci known today that focuses centrally on male same-sex relations, Phoenixes Flying Together offers a vital example of early modern queer literary tradition by illustrating fluid male-male bonds and hybrid ideals of homosexuality. Such textual representations shift Confucian cardinal relations, redefine the power of nanse, and demonstrate queer identifications beyond heteronormative relations. Reading women’s tanci through the intersectional lenses of early modernity, queer theory, and narrativity, this study examines such narratives as an inspiration to initiate a more contextualized epistemological, historical, and methodical understanding of the dynamic textual spaces that harbor same-sex intimacies, erotic desires, and clandestine longings in vernacular traditions. Narratives of male intimacy, camaraderie, and homosexual love in Cheng’s text facilitate the construction of queer subjectivities through character focalization and embedded frames of storytelling and thereby reconfigure patrilineal norms of personal, familial, societal, and political relations. Ultimately, when engaged in conversation with global queer discourses, early modern Chinese vernacular narratives foster a culturally situated understanding of queer historiography, as well as the shifting social structures of power that often condition and facilitate nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality.]
Guo, Yanli. “An Introduction to Modern Chinese Female Literature.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 3, 2 (2003): 109-22.
Hamm, John Christopher. “Reading the Swordsman’s Tale: Shisanmei and Ernu yingxiong zhuan.” T’oung Pao 84 (1998): 328-55.
Hanan, Patrick. “The Missionary Novels of Nineteenth-Century China.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies LX, 2 (2000): 413-44.
—–. “A Study in Acculturation–The First Novels Translated into Chinese.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles and Reviews 23 (2002): 55-80.
—–. Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. NY: Columbia UP, 2004.
[Abstract: It has often been said that the nineteenth century was a relatively stagnant period for Chinese fiction, but preeminent scholar Patrick Hanan shows that the opposite is true: the finest novels of the nineteenth century show a constant experimentation and evolution. In this collection of detailed and insightful essays, Hanan examines Chinese fiction before and during the period in which Chinese writers first came into contact with western fiction. Hanan explores the uses made of fiction by westerners in China; the adaptation and integration of western methods in Chinese fiction; and the continued vitality of the Chinese fictional tradition. Some western missionaries, for example, wrote religious novels in Chinese, almost always with the aid of native assistants who tended to change aspects of the work to “fit” Chinese taste. Later, such works as Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Jonathan Swift’s “A Voyage to Lilliput,” the novels of Jules Verne, and French detective stories were translated into Chinese. These interventions and their effects are explored here for virtually the first time. Contents: (1) The Narrator’s Voice Before the “Fiction Revolution”; (2) Illusion of Romance and the Courtesan Novel; (3) The Missionary Novels of the Nineteenth Century; (4) The First Novel Translated Into Chinese; (5) The Translated Fiction in the Early Shen Bao; (6) The New Novel Before the New Novel—John Fryer’s Fiction Contest; (7) The Second Stage of Vernacular Translation; (8) Wu Jianren and the Narrator; (9) Specific Literary Relations of Sea of Regret; (10) The Autobiographical Romance of Chen Diexian; (11) The Technique of Lu Xun’s Fiction]
—–. “1895, May 25: The ‘New Novel’ before the Rise of the New Novel.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 139-44.
Harrell, Paula. Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895-1905. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
He, Keren. “Dying against Democracy: Suicide Protest and the 1905 Anti-American Boycott.” Journal of Asian Studies 80, 4 (Nov. 2021): 865-88.
[Abstract: The joint rise of popular movements and mass media in early twentieth-century China gave birth to a democratic imagination, which culminated in the anti-American boycott of 1905. The transnational campaign nonetheless disintegrated as a result of partisan division—an ingrained predicament of democratic agonism that is best illustrated by the story of Feng Xiawei, a grassroots activist whose suicide in Shanghai constituted a key moment in the boycott. Juxtaposing a variety of accounts about Feng’s death in journalism, political fiction, reformed opera, and advertisements, this article examines how, together, these texts construct democratic agonism and suicide protest as revealing two opposing political sensibilities as well as modes of action. Instead of expressing only nationalist passion, Feng’s suicide reveals a deep anxiety of his time to locate a spiritual source of authority in the face of its glaring absence in social negotiation. This fraught dynamic between the democratic and the transcendent continues to characterize modern Chinese political culture to the present.]
Heroldova, Helena. “Glass Submarines and Electric Balloons: Creating Scientific and Technical Vocabulary in Chinese Science Fiction.” In Lackner, Michael and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds. Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 537-554.
Hon, Tze-ki. “National Essence, National Learning, and Culture: Historical Writings in Guocui xuebao, Xueheng, and Guoxue jikan.” Historiography East and West 1, 2 (2003): 241-86.
—–. Revolution as Restoration: Guocui xuebao and China’s Path to Modernity, 1905-1911. Leiden: Brill, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Peter Zarrow]
[Abstract: Revolution as Restoration examines the journal Guocui xuebao (1905-1911) to elucidate the momentous political and social changes in early twentieth-century China. Rather than viewing the journal as a collection of documents for studying a thinker (e.g., Zhang Taiyan), a concept (e.g., national essence), or an intellectual movement (e.g., cultural conservatism), this book focuses on the global network of commerce and communication that allowed independent publications to appear in the Chinese print market. As such, this book offers a different perspective on the Chinese quest for modernity. It shows that, from the start, the Chinese quest for modernity was never completely orchestrated by the central government, nor was it static and monolithic as the teleology of revolution describes.]
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: PUP, 1978, 221-57.
Hu, Ying. “Reconfiguring Nei/Wai: Writing the Woman Traveler in the Late Qing.” Late Imperial China 18, 1 (1997): 72-99.
—–. Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1898-1918. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
—–. “Naming the First New Woman: The Case of Kang Aide.” NAN NÜ: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 3, 2 (2001).
—–. “Naming the First ‘New Woman.'” In Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in late Qing China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.
—–. “Late Qing Fiction.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 348-54. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 104-110.
—–. “‘How Can a Daughter Glorify the Family Name?’ Filiality and Women’s Rights in the Late Qing.” Nannu: Men, Women and Gender in China 11, 2 (2009): 234-69.
[Abstract: This paper examines married daughters’ filiality toward their natal families through three case studies. The protagonists are Qiu Jin (1875?-1907), Wu Zhiying (1868-1934) and Xu Zihua (1873-1935). Using the lens of filiality, we are able to observe the finer nuances of their gendered self-conception within the context of the rapidly changing world at the end of China’s imperial era. I argue that the language and sentiment of filiality facilitated a substantial broadening of women’s rights: in expanding what a literati daughter can claim as her intellectual inheritance, in providing the basis of a legal argument for a daughter’s inheritance rights, and in offering a conduit for the experience of women’s participation in political changes.]
—–. “Late Qing Literature, 1890s-1910s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 54-66.
—–. Burying Autumn: Poetry, Friendship, and Loss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016.
Huang, Yingying. “Bound Feet Travel: Revisualizing Footbinding in John Fryer’s Fiction Contest.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 1 (Spring 2020): 37-72.
Hung, Eva. “Giving Texts a Context: Chinese Translations of Classical English Detective Stories, 1896-1916.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdan, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 25-36.
Huntington, Rania. “The Weird in the Newspaper.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 341-97. [deals mostly with the Dianshizhai huabao]
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.
—–. “Between Praxis and Essence: The Search for Cultural Expression in the Chinese Revolution.” In Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner eds., Marxism and the Chinese Experience. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989, 316-37.
—–. Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. [MCLC Resource Center review by Bonnie S. McDougall]
—–. “1755: The Revival of Letters in Nineteenth-Century China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 46-50.
—–. “1897: Language Reform and Its Discontents.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 151-56.
—–. Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Nathaniel Isaacson]
[Abstract: Modernity, modernization, modernism, and the modern have all been key, interrelated terms in post-traditional China. For all their ubiquity, however, in previous studies of Chinese culture and society there has been insufficient clarity as to what the precise meanings each term has encompassed from the period beginning in 1895, the year of China’s catastrophic defeat by Japan. The importance of these terms is underlined by their implication in China’s positioning in the world over the course of the past century and a half, as well as the path China will follow in the future. Looking into a set of concepts and practices that have been instrumental in China’s road to modernity, namely, the definition of the modern itself, a new notion of literature, linguistic reform, translation, popular culture, and the transformation of the publishing world, Taking China to the World explores the various ways in which activity in the cultural sphere shaped Chinese perceptions of both how its historical course might evolve and how all-compassing change needed to be managed. Most studies of China’s modern transformation have implicitly based themselves on the inevitability of a process of cultural, social, and institutional rationalization, more often than not based on Western models, without grappling with the full extent of the struggles to reconcile needed changes with a grand tradition, which, for all the condemnation aimed at it after 1895, still held a powerful appeal for most of those who seriously considered the full extent of the interactions between new and old. That an idea of a monolithic new seemed to take hold of many members of the Chinese elite after the period circa 1920 does not rule out the subtle hold that key portions of the grand tradition have had over modern China. No other book offers this kind of analysis of both the historical origins and contemporary consequences of the agonizing choices made by actors in the cultural sphere who occupied core positions in the life of the Chinese nation.]
—–. “Wenxue and New Practices of Writing in Post-1840 China.” In Ori Sela, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2023.
Isaacson, Nathaniel. “Science Fiction for the Nation: Tales of the Moon Colony and the Birth of Modern Chinese Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 40, 1 (2013): 33-54.
Jin, Huan. “1843, the Second Half of June: In Search of Chinese Utopia: The Taiping Rebellion as a Literary Event.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 79-84.
Jin, Wen. “Sentimentalism’s Translational Journeys: Bitter Society and Lin Shu’s Translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 26, 1 (Spring 2014): 105-140.
Jin, Yuan. “The Influence of Translated Fiction on Chinese Romantic Fiction.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 283-302.
Judge, Joan. “Reforming the Feminine: Female Literacy and the Legacy of 1898.” In Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in late Qing China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.
—–. “Key Words in the Late Qing Reform Discourse: Classical and Contemporary Sources of Authority.” Indiana East Asian Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China.
Karl, Rebecca E.. “‘Slavery,’ Citizenship, and Gender in Late Qing China’s Global Contexts.” In Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in late Qing China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002, 212-44.
Karl, Rebecca E. and Peter Zarrow, eds. Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in late Qing China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.
Kaske, Elisabeth. “Mandarin, Vernacular and National Language–China’s Emerging Concept of a National Language in the Early Twentieth Century.” In Lackner, Michael and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds. Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 265-304.
—–. The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 1895-1919. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
[Abstract: The study examines the origins of the “literary revolution” proclaimed in 1917 which laid the foundation for the replacement of the classical language by the vernacular as China’s national language and medium of national literature. A unique, multifaceted approach is used to explain the political significance of the classical/vernacular divide against the backdrop of social change that followed the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5. Seeing education as the central battleground for all debates on language, the study in six thoroughly documented chapters investigates the language policy of the Qing and Republican governments, vernacular journalism of the revolutionaries, the activities of urban script reformers, the linguistic thought of the national essence advocates, and the emergence of a scholarly interest in the vernacular in academic circles.]
Keulemans, Paize. “Recreating the Storyteller Image: Publishing Martial Arts Fiction to Renew the Public in the Late Qing.” Twentieth-Century China 29, 2 (April 2004): 7-38.
—–. “Printing the Sound of Cosmopolitan Beijing: Dialect Accents in Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction.” In Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed, eds., From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008. Leiden, Brill, 2010, 159-84.
—–. Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Mengjun Li]
[Abstract: Chinese martial arts novels from the late nineteenth century are filled with a host of suggestive sounds. Characters cuss and curse in colorful dialect accents, vendor calls ring out from bustling marketplaces, and martial arts action scenes come to life with the loud clash of swords and the sounds of bodies colliding. What is the purpose of these sounds, and what is their history? In Sound Rising from the Paper, Keulemans answers these questions by critically reexamining the relationship between martial arts novels published in the final decades of the nineteenth century and earlier storyteller manuscripts. He finds that by incorporating, imitating, and sometimes inventing storyteller sounds, these novels turned the text from a silent object into a lively simulacrum of festival atmosphere, thereby transforming the solitary act of reading into the communal sharing of an oral performance. By focusing on the role sound played in late nineteenth-century martial arts fiction, Keulemans offers alternatives to the visual models that have dominated our approach to the study of print culture, the commercialization of textual production, and the construction of the modern reading subject.]
Knight, Sabina. “Predicaments of Modernity in Late-Qing Novels, 1895-1911.” In The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006, 51-72.
Kockum, Keiko. Japanese Achievement, Chinese Inspiration: A Study of the Japanese Influence on the Modernisation of the Late Qing Novel. Stockholm: Orientaliska Studier, 1990.
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 Schoos” during Late Qing and Early Republican China. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 2006.
Kwan, Uganda Sze Pui. “1873, June 19: The Politics of Translation and the Romanization of Chinese into a World Language.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 119-25.
Kwong, S.K. A Mosaic of the Hundred Days: Personalities, Politics and Ideas of 1898. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984.
Lackner, Michael, Iwo Amelung, and Joachim Kurtz, eds. New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge and Lexical China in Late Imperial China. Boston, Koln: Leiden, 2001.
Lackner, Michael and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds. Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
[Abstract: Mapping Meanings is essentially a broad-ranged introduction to China’s intellectual entry into the family of nations. Written by a fine selection of experts, it guides the reader into the terrain of China’s (late Qing) encounter with Western knowledge and modern sciences, and at the same time connects convincingly to the broader question of the mobility of knowledge. The late Qing literati’s pursue of New Learning was a transnational practice inseparable from the local context. Mapping Meanings therefore attempts to highlight what the encountered global knowledge could have meant to specific social actors in the specific historical situation. Subjects included are the transformation of the examination system, the establishment of academic disciplines, and new social actors and questions of new terminologies.]
Lai, John T. P. “Robert Morrison’s Chinese Literature and Translated Modernity.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 56-62.
Larson, Wendy. “Psychology and Freudian Sexual Theory in Early 20th Century China.” In Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009, 31-76.
Lee, Haiyan. “All the Feelings That Are Fit to Print: The Community of Sentiment and the Literary Public Sphere in China, 1900-1918.” Modern China 27, no. 3 (July 2001): 291-327.
—–. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. [MCLC Resource Center review by Charles Laughlin]
Lee, Mabel. “Chinese Women and Social Change: A Theme in Late Ch’ing Fiction and Its Subsequent Development.” In Gungwu Wang, ed., Society and the Writer: Essays on Literature in Modern Asia. Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, 1981, 123-38.
Lei, Jun. Master of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China 1890s-1930s. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: The crisis of masculinity surfaced and converged with the crisis of the nation in the late Qing, after the doors of China were forced open by Opium Wars. The power of physical aggression increasingly overshadowed literary attainments and became a new imperative of male honor in the late Qing and early Republican China. Afflicted with anxiety and indignation about their increasingly effeminate image as perceived by Western colonial powers, Chinese intellectuals strategically distanced themselves from the old literati and reassessed their positions vis-à-vis violence. In Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s–1930s, Jun Lei explores the formation and evolution of modern Chinese intellectual masculinities as constituted in racial, gender, and class discourses mediated by the West and Japan. This book brings to light a new area of interest in the “Man Question” within gender studies in which women have typically been the focus. To fully reveal the evolving masculine models of a “scholar-warrior,” this book employs an innovative methodology that combines theoretical vigor, archival research, and analysis of literary texts and visuals. Situating the changing inter- and intra-gender relations in modern Chinese history and Chinese literary and cultural modernism, the book engages critically with male subjectivity in relation to other pivtal issues such as semi-coloniality, psychoanalysis, modern love, feminism, and urbanization.]
Leung, Shuk Man. “The Public Sphere and Literary Journals: An Investigation of the Discursive Formation of New Fiction’s Utopian Imagination in Late Qing.” Comparative Literature Studies 51, 4 (2014): 557-86.
[Abstract: This article considers New Fiction’s utopian imagination in the Late Qing period as a product of Foucauldian discursive formation, an important element of which is the channel of production through literary journals in the Chinese public sphere. Developing Jürgen Habermas’s concept of a bourgeois public sphere during eighteenth- and nineteeth-century Europe, Rudolf Wagner’s notion of a Chinese public sphere stresses that the participants came from the top and bottom of society, and that the Qing court was an important and legitimate player. In applying that notion, this article shows how fiction could be a means of public opinion and how a literary journal could be a platform in the public sphere. Monthly Fiction and Racing Independent Club Fiction Monthly, and their publication of utopian novels, are two examples that demonstrate their reactions to political issues and their vertical relationship with the court in the Chinese public sphere. By examining these two case studies, the processes by which the narratives of a new China(s) were produced by this utopian discourse are shown.]
—–. “New Fiction as a Public Opinion: The Utopian/Dystopian Imagination in Revolutionary Periodicals in Late Qing China.” In Rasoul Aliakbari, ed., Comparative Print Culture: A Study of Alternative Literary Modernities. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 105-121.
—–. “Chinese Settler Colonialism and the Borderless National Imagination in Late Qing Utopian Fiction: A Case Study of Lü Sheng’s A Madman’s Dream.” Asian Studies Review 47, 3 (Jan. 2023): 500–517.
—–. Utopian Fiction in China: Genre, Print Culture and Knowledge Formation, 1902-1912. Leiden: Brill, 2023. [MCLC Resource Center review by Hang Tu]
[Abstract: Unlike previous studies that have examined the late Qing utopian imagination as an ahistorical motif, a literary theme, and a translation phenomenon, in this book Shuk Man Leung considers utopian fiction as a knowledge apparatus that helped develop Chinese nationalism and modernity. Based on untapped primary sources in Chinese, English, and Japanese, her research reveals how utopian imagination, blooming after Liang Qichao’s publication of The Future of New China, served as a tool of knowledge formation and dissemination that transformed China’s public sphere and catalysed historical change. Embracing interdisciplinary approach from genre studies, studies on modern Chinese newspapers and intellectual history, this book provides an analysis of the development of utopian literary practices, epistemic meanings, and fictional narratives and the interactions between traditional and imported knowledge that helped shape the discourse in early 20th century China.]
Li, Danke. “Popular Culture in the Making of Anti-Imperialist and Nationalist Sentiments in Sichuan.” Modern China 30, 4 (Oct. 2004): 470-505.
[Abstract: Existing Western scholarship on the rights recovery movement in Sichuan mainly focuses on the role played by elites. This article argues that popular culture, in the form of folk stories, songs, and children’s primers, also contributed to that movement by shaping and expressing popular anti-imperialist attitudes. Its analysis of primers available in late Qing Sichuan and popular stories about the activities of foreigners prevalent in the early 1900s serves to reveal a rich local cultural milieu of time-nurtured anti-imperialist sentiment among common people, which broadly influenced local political action. The protests over the Jiangbei mining concession encompassed both elite and ordinary people, although each group understood the issue differently.]
Li, Hsiao-t’i. Opera, Society, and Politics: Chinese Intellectuals and Popular Culture, 1901-1937. Ph. D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1996.
—–. “Making a Name and a Culture for the Masses in China.” positions: east asia cultures critique 9, 1 (Spring 2001): 29-68.
Li, Jin and Sean MacDonald. “Three Late Qing Translations of Robinson Crusoe: Shen Zufen, Dalu bao, and Lin Shu.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 38 (2016): 79-106.
[Abstract: William Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of the most translated works of Western literature in the history of translation in China. It was read by many in China as a figure of Western culture that had suddenly risen to prominence on the world stage. This paper discusses three important translations from the first decade of the twentieth century, the Shen Zufen translation, which refigures Crusoe within Reform Movement discourse, the Dalu bao translation that reimagined Crusoe as Revolutionary Outlaws of the Marsh type of popular hero, and the Lin Shu/Zeng Zonggong translation, which reframed Crusoe within Confucian discourse. These early twentieth-century translations serve as profound case studies for the entwinement and tension of global universals and national position-takings occurring in our present historic moment.
Li, Wai-yee. Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 92. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014.
Li, Yuhang. “Oneself as a Female Deity: Representations of Empress Dowager Cixi as Guanyin.” Nannu: Men, Women and Gender in China 14, 1 (2012): 75-118.
Liang, Samuel Y. Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners’ City, 1853-98. NY: Routledge, 2010.
[Abstract: This book argues that modernity first arrived in late nineteenth-century Shanghai via a new spatial configuration. This city’s colonial capitalist development ruptured the traditional configuration of self-contained households, towns, and natural landscapes in a continuous spread, producing a new set of fragmented as well as fluid spaces. In this process, Chinese sojourners actively appropriated new concepts and technology rather than passively responding to Western influences. Liang maps the spatial and material existence of these transient people and reconstructs a cultural geography that spreads from the interior to the neighbourhood and public spaces.]
Lin, Shaoyang. “Making National History with Literary History: Hegel’s Influence via Taine on Meiji Japan and the Late Qing and Early Republican China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 2 (2015): 160-89.
[Abstract: The essay sheds lights on the process of the making of national history with literary history in modern Japan and its influences on modern China. It argues that the simultaneous establishment of modern Japanese historiography and the writing of literary history in Japan had a direct impact on the establishment of Chinese historiography in the late Qing, and the writing of Chinese literary history in twentieth-century China. It will focus more on the philosophical ideas of Taine and Hegel and their influence in Japanese literary historiography and, due to the limited length of this paper, only by extension, that of China as well. The primary focus of this paper is the interaction of the modern Japanese and Chinese pursuit of new historical narratives in the construction of new national and cultural identities in the context of global modernity. It also stresses that, an invisible “origin,” the writing of Chinese (literary) history in the early twentieth-century, ironically, directly and indirectly, has been internalized by the writing of Japanese national history in an exclusive framework of nation-building.]
Liu, Jen-Peng. “The Disposition of Hierarchy and the Late Qing Discourse of Gender Equality.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2, 1 (April 2001): 69-79.
Liu, Jianmei. “Nation, Women, and Gender in the Late Qing.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Rosemary Roberts, and Yang Ling, eds. Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009, 71-92.
Liu, Joyce C. H. “Force of Psyche: Electricity or Void? Re-examination of the Hermeneutics of the Force of Psyche in Late Qing China.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 151-81.
Liu, Lydia, ed. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
—–. “The Translator’s Turn: The Birth of Modern Chinese Language and Fiction.” In Victor H. Mair, ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2001, 1055-1066.
Liu, Lydia, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. NY: Columbia University Press, 2013.
[Abstract: He-Yin Zhen (ca. 1884-1920?) was a theorist who figured centrally in the birth of Chinese feminism. Unlike her contemporaries, she was concerned less with China’s fate as a nation and more with the relationship among patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and gender subjugation as global historical problems. This volume, the first translation and study of He-Yin’s work in English, critically reconstructs early twentieth-century Chinese feminist thought in a transnational context by juxtaposing He-Yin Zhen’s writing against works by two better-known male interlocutors of her time. The editors begin with a detailed analysis of He-Yin Zhen’s life and thought. They then present annotated translations of six of her major essays, as well as two foundational tracts by her male contemporaries, Jin Tianhe (1874-1947) and Liang Qichao (1873¡V1929), to which He-Yin’s work responds and with which it engages. Jin, a poet and educator, and Liang, a philosopher and journalist, understood feminism as a paternalistic cause that liberals like themselves should defend. He-Yin presents an alternative conception that draws upon anarchism and other radical trends. Ahead of her time, He-Yin Zhen complicates conventional accounts of feminism and China’s history, offering original perspectives on sex, gender, labor, and power that remain relevant today.]
Liu, Siyuan. Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
[Abstract: n 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 ofkabuki 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.]
Liu, Wei-p’ing. “The Poetry Revolution of the Late Ch’ing Period: A Reevaluation.” In A.R. Davis and A.D. Stefanowska, eds. Austrina Marricksville: Oriental Society of Australia, 1982, 188-99.
Long, Hoyt, Anatoly Detwyler, and Yuancheng Zhu. “Self-Repetition and East Asian Literary Modernity, 1900-1930.” Cultural Analytics (May 21, 2018).
Luo, Di. Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945. Leiden: Brill, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Frederik H. Green]
Luo, Zhitian. Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society. Trs. Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. Leiden: Brill, 2017. [MCLC Resource Center review by Theodore D. Huters]
[Abstract: In Shifts of Power, Luo brings together nine essays to explore the causes and consequences of various shifts of power in modern Chinese society, including the shift from scholars to intellectuals, from the traditional state to the modern state, and from the people to society. Adopting a microhistorical approach, Luo situates these shifts at the intersection of social change and intellectual evolution in the midst of modern China’s culture wars with the West. Those culture wars produced new problems for China, but also provided some new intellectual resources as Chinese scholars and intellectuals grappled with the collisions and convergences of old and new in late Qing and early Republican China.]
Ma, Shaoling. The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Xuenan Cao]
[Abstract: In the final decades of the Manchu Qing dynasty in China, technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, telegraph, and photography were both new and foreign. In The Stone and the Wireless Shaoling Ma analyzes diplomatic diaries, early science fiction, feminist poetry, photography, telegrams, and other archival texts, and shows how writers, intellectuals, reformers, and revolutionaries theorized what media does despite lacking a vocabulary to do so. Media defines the dynamics between technologies and their social or cultural forms, between devices or communicative processes and their representations in texts and images. More than simply reexamining late Qing China’s political upheavals and modernizing energies through the lens of media, Ma shows that a new culture of mediation was helping to shape the very distinctions between politics, gender dynamics, economics, and science and technology. Ma contends that mediation lies not only at the heart of Chinese media history but of media history writ large.]
Mangalagiri, Adhira. “Slave of the Colonizer: The Indian Policeman in Colonial Chinese Literature.” In Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui, eds., Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840-1960s. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021, 29-66.
[Abstract: This chapter reads Chinese poetry, short stories, and novels (1900-1930) that engage the much-despised figure of the Indian policeman stationed by the British in China’s semicolonial treaty ports. Grappling with the challenge of apprehending this Indian figure – who held the unique capacity to frustrate entrenched binaries of colonized and colonizer, brother and enemy, self and other – the Chinese texts articulate an antagonism at once founded upon intimacy and yet in expression of conflict. The texts engage in an exercise of thinking China and India together outside the tenets of pan-Asianist solidarity, extending a form of relation born out of repulsion. Although it erodes friendly ties, this mode of China-India thought proves generative, reshaping debates on literary language, national autonomy, and revolution underway in late-Qing and early-Republican China, and telling the story of modern Chinese literature’s development anew from the perspective of this unlikely Indian interlocuter.]
Mao, Peijie. “‘Loving Nation’ and ‘Subjugated Nation’: Popular Narratives of the Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai.” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 4, 2 (2018): 221-236
[Abstract: This article examines the nationalist discourse in Shanghai popular print media during the late Qing and the early Republican period, focusing on the literary representation and imagination of ‘loving nation’ (aiguo) and ‘subjugated nation’ (wangguo) in popular fiction. It discusses the popular nationalism through ‘patriotic stories’ (aiguo xiaoshuo), a fiction genre promoted by Shanghai popular media in the 1910s, which, on the one hand, responded to the external plights of the newly established Republic of China, while on the other shaped the popular imagination of a new national identity and modern nation state. I argue that ‘patriotic stories’ contributed to this national imaginary through a discovery of sentimentality, female emotionality and an increasing fancy of the ‘other’, while simultaneously producing the competing narratives of romantic love and patriotic feelings, and private and public realms. This sentimental narrative was also inextricably interwoven with the narratives of trauma and humiliation, and an imagination of wangguo in popular fiction. Viewing patriotism as a cultural production constructed through memory, imagination and reinterpretation, I suggest that the popular imagination of nation generated a hybrid and uniquely powerful mode of nationalistic narrative, one conjoining sentimentalism, patriotism and commercial interests in early twentieth-century China.]
Martin, Helmut. “A Transitional Concept of Chinese Literature 1897-1917: Liang Qichao on Poetry Reform, Historical Drama and the Political Novel.” Oriens Extremus 20, 2 (1973): 175-217.
Ming, Feng-ying. “Baoyu in Wonderland: Technological Utopia in the Early Modern Chinese Science Fiction Novel.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998, 152-72.
Murthy, Viren. “The Politics of Fengjian in Late Qing and Early Republican China.” In Kai-wing Chow, Tze-ki Hon and Hung-yok Ip eds., Modernities as Local Practices, Nationalism, and Cultural Production: Deconstructing the May-Fourth Paradigm on Modern China. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008.
Ng, Kenny K. K. “Ending as Beginning: Chinese. Translations of Edward Bellamy’s Utopian Novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10, 1 (2016): 9-35.
[Abstract: The Chinese translation of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1887) at the turn of the twentieth century has been little studied, in spite of Bellamy’s obvious influence on Chinese intellectuals and reformist thinkers. Enthusiastically embraced by the intelligentsia as a gospel of social change, the utopian fiction has inspired subsequent Chinese writings of science fantasy in popular fiction. Bellamy’s tale centers on the adventure of time-traveler Julian West, a young Bostonian who is put into a hypnotic sleep in the late nineteenth century and awakens in the year 2000 in a socialist utopia. He discovers an ideally realized vision of the future, one unthinkable in his own century. This article argues that Chinese translators, in their conventional form of storytelling, have intentionally converted Bellamy’s original religious prophesy into a vision of a new and modernized state that is in line with the Chinese evolutionary historical imagination. It discusses the problematic of imagining the future by delineating the relationships of utopianism, social modernity, and temporality as the novel was written by an engaged American writer and then rendered into various Chinese versions by Western missionaries, Chinese intellectuals, and popular writers.]
Owen, Stephen. “1820, Beijing: Utter Disillusion and Acts of Repentance in Late Classical Poetry.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 74-79.
Pan, Jianguo. “Metal Typography, Stone Lithography, and the Dissemination of Ming-Qing Popular Fictions in Shanghai between 1874-1911. Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 2, 4 (Dec. 2008): 561-582.
Peng, Hsiao-yen. Modern Chinese Counter Enlightenment: Affect, Reason, and the Transcultural Lexicon. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Peng Hsiao-yen argues that a trend of CounterEnlightenment had grown from the late Qing to the May Fourth era in the 1910s to the 1920s and continued to the 1940s. She demonstrates how Counter-Enlightenment was manifested with case studies such as Lu Xun’s writings in the late 1900s, the Aesthetic Education movement from the 1910s to 1920s, and the Science and Lifeview debate in the 1920s. During the period, the life philosophy movement, highlighting the epistemic debate on affect and reason, is connected with its counterparts in Germany, France, and Japan. The movement had widespread and long-term impact on Chinese philosophy and literature. Using the transcultural lexicon as methodology, this book traces how the German term Lebensanschauung (lifeview), a key concept in Rudolf Eucken’s life philosophy, constituted a global tide of Counter-Enlightenment that influenced the thought of leading Chinese intellectuals in the Republican era. Peng contends that Chinese intellectuals’ transcultural connections with others in the philosophical pursuit of knowledge triggered China’s self-transformation. She has successfully reconstructed the missing link in the Chinese theater of the worldwide dialectic of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.]
Pollard, David E., ed. Translation and Creation: Reading of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840-1918. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998.
Průšek, Jaroslav. “The Changing Role of the Narrator in Chinese Novels at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” Archív Orientdíní 38 (1970): 169-178. Rpt. in Leo Ou-fan Lee, ed., The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
Qian, Nanxiu. “Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms.” Modern China 29, 4 (Oct. 2003): 399-454.
—–. Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
[Abstract: The “Hundred Day’s Reform” has received a great deal of attention from historians who have focused on the well-known male historical actors, but until now the Qing women reformers have received almost no consideration. In this book, historian Nanxiu Qian reveals the contributions of the active, optimistic, and self-sufficient women reformers of the late Qing Dynasty. Qian examines the late Qing reforms from the perspective of Xue Shaohui, a leading woman writer who openly argued against male reformers’ approach that subordinated women’s issues to larger national concerns, instead prioritizing women’s self-improvement over national empowerment. Drawing upon intellectual and spiritual resources from the freewheeling, xianyuan (worthy ladies) model of the Wei-Jin period of Chinese history (220–420) and the culture of women writers of late imperial China, and open to Western ideas and knowledge, Xue and the reform-minded members of her social and intellectual networks went beyond the inherited Confucian pattern in their quest for an ideal womanhood and an ideal social order. Demanding equal political and educational rights with men, women reformers challenged leading male reformers’ purpose of achieving national “wealth and power,” intending instead to unite women of all nations in an effort to create a just and harmonious new world.]
Qian, Tony D. “Passion and Passio: The Chahua nü and Late Qing Courtesan Narratives.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 35, 2 (Winter 2023): 231-61.
Rankin, Mary. Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902-1911. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Rea, Christopher. The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by David Moser]
Rojas, Carlos. “1820: Flowers in the Mirror and Chinese Women: At Home in the World.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 69-74.
Saari, Hon L. Legacies of Childhood: Growing Up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890-1920. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1990.
Schonebaum, Andrew. “1792: Legacies in Clash: Anticipatory Modernity versus Imaginary Nostalgia.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 51-56.
Shi Meng 時萌. Wanqing xiaoshuo 晚清小說 (Late Qing fiction). Shanghai: Shanghai guji , 1989.
Starr, Chloë F. “Shifting Boundaries: Gender in Pinhua Baojian.” Nan nü 1, 2 (1999): 268-302.
—–. “Narrating the Passage of Text: Reading Multiple Editions of the Nineteenth-century novel Huayue hen (Traces of Flowers and the Moon).” In Daria Berg, ed., Reading China. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
—–. Red-light Novels of the Late Qing. Leiden: Brill, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by John Christopher Hamm]
[Abstract: Chinese literature has traditionally been divided by both theorists and university course providers into ‘classical’ and ‘modern.’ This has left nineteenth-century fiction in limbo, and allowed negative assessments of its quality to persist unchecked. The popularity of Qing dynasty red-light fiction – works whose primary focus is the relationship between clients and courtesans, set in tea-houses, pleasure gardens, and later, brothels – has endured throughout the twentieth century. This volume explores why, arguing that these novels are far from the ‘low’ work of ‘frustrated scholars’ but in their provocative play on the nature of relations between client, courtesan and text, provide an insight into wider changes in understandings of self and literary value in the nineteenth century.]
Song, Gang. “A Paradox In-Between: The Dianshizhai Pictorial and Late 19th Century Chinese Literature.” The International Journal of the Humanities 2, 1 (n.d.).
Song, Mingwei. “The Adventures of Old Youth: Late Qing Travelers and Reformers.” In Song, Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015, 60-112.
Swislocki, Mark. “Imagining Irreconcilability: Cultural Differentiation through Human-Animal Relations in Late Qing Shanghai.” positions: asia critique 20, 4 (Fall 2012): 1159-1189.
Tang, Xiaobing. “‘Poetic Revolution,’ Colonization, 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 in late Qing China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.
Teng, Emma J. “1862, October 11: Wang Tao Lands in Hong Kong.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 108-13.
Teruo, Tarumoto. “A Statistical Survey of Translated Fiction, 1840-1920.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdan, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 37-42.
—–. 樽本照雄, Xinbian zengbu qingmo minchu xiaoshuo mulu 新編增補清末民初小說目錄 (A newly edited catalogue of fiction in late Qing and early Republican China). Tr. He Wei 賀偉. Ji’nan: Shandong qilu, 2002.
Tsai, Chien-hsin. “1896, April 17: Qiu Fengjia and the Poetics of Tears.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 144-50.
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.
Tsu, Jing. Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of a Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2005.
[Abstract: How often do we think of cultural humiliation and failure as strengths? Against prevailing views on what it means to enjoy power as individuals, cultures, or nations, this provocative book looks at the making of cultural and national identities in modern China as building success on failure. It reveals the exercise of sovereign power where we least expect it and shows how this is crucial to our understanding of a modern world of conflict, violence, passionate suffering, and cultural difference. ]
Tu, Wei-ming. “The Enlightenment Mentality and the Chinese Intellectual Dilemma.” In K. Lieberthal et al., eds., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991, 103-18.
Vinci, Renata. “The advent of duanpian xiaoshuo: a combination of western discourse and Chinese legacy in the early definitions of the modern short story.” Rivista degli studi orientali XCIII, 4 (2020): 135-149.
Wagner, Rudolf. “1872, October 14: Media, Literature, and Early Chinese Modernity.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 114-19.
Wang, Cheng-hua. “‘Going Public’: Portraits of the Empress Dowager Cixi, Circa 1904.” Nannu: Men, Women and Gender in China 14, 1 (2012): 119-76.
Wang, David Der-wei. Fin-de-siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848-1911. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
[Abstract: The reigning view of literary historians has been that the May Fourth movement of 1919 marks the division between the traditional and the modern in Chinese literature. This book argues that signs of reform and innovation can be discerned long before May Fourth, and that as China entered the arena of modern, international history in the late Qing, it was already developing its own complex matrix of incipient modernities. It demonstrates that late Qing fiction nurtured a creative, innovative poetics, one that was spurned by the reformers of the May Fourth generation in favor of Western-style realism. The author recognizes that a full account of modern Chinese fiction needs to ask why so many genres, styles, themes, and figures found in late imperial fiction were repressed by “modern” Chinese literary discourse. He focuses on four genres of late Qing fiction that have been either rudely dismissed in pejorative terms or simply ignored: depravity romances, court-case and chivalric cycles, grotesque expose, and scientific fantasies. The author shows that in spite of the realist orthodoxy that has dominated Chinese literature since the May Fourth movement, these unwelcome genres have continually found their way back into mainstream discourse, their influence being increasingly evident in recent decades. This first comprehensive study of late Qing fiction discusses more than sixty works, at least half of which have rarely or never been dealt with by Western or Chinese scholars. Richly informed by contemporary literary theory, this book constitutes a polemical rethinking of the nature of Chinese literary and cultural modernity.]
—–. “Translating Modernity.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdan, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 303-329.
—–. “Return to Go: Fictional Innovation in the Late Qing and the Late Twentieth Century.” In Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001, 257-97.
—-. “Nonconformism as Narrative Strategy: A Reappraisal of Late Ch’ing Fiction.” Asian Culture Quarterly 7, 2 (1984): 55-72.
—–. “Storytelling Context in Chinese Fiction: A Preliminary Examination of It as a Mode of Narrative Discourse.” Tamkang Review 6, 1 (1984/85): 133-50.
Wang, Chih-ming. “1847, January 4: My Life in China and America and Transpacific Translations.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 85-90.
Wang, David Der-wei. “1853: Foreign Devils, Chinese Sorcerers, and the Politics of Literary Anachronism.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 97-102.
Wang, Dun. “Give Me a Day, and I Will Give You the World”: Chinese Fiction Periodicals in Global Context. Ph. D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, 2008.
—–. “The Late Qing’s Other Utopias: China’s Science-Fictional Imagination, 1900-1910.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 34, 2 (Sept. 2008).
[Abstract: This research paper examines the genesis and mechanism of China’s imagination of the future at the turn of the 20th century, a time when the country’s current socio-political reality was seen as being in many ways abominable, while the future was seen as a utopian dreamland of possibility and hope. An analysis of Wu Jianren’s the late Qing fiction The New Story of the Stone (1905), especially its second half which depicts the future China as a “Civilized Realm,” shows the influence on the young Chinese writers of contemporary Western science fiction and (especially) utopian fiction. It also shows that these late Qing writers wanted to portray their imagined China of the future as being “better” than the contemporary West (and also future West of Western utopian narratives) inasmuch as it will be using (originally Western) technology in a manner which is fundamentally moral and spiritual, as befits China’s traditional culture. Here the key contrast is between, on the one hand, ancient (Confucian, Daoist) Chinese civilization, moral idealism and spirituality, and on the other hand (contemporary and future) Western barbarism, empiricism, materialism, pragmatism, a “non-humanism” which seems to ignore moral and spiritual life. The author points out that Wu Jianren’s future Chinese Civilized Realm has turned Western technology (the X-ray machine) into a “spiritual technology” (the Moral Nature Inspection Lens) which justifies China’s own cultural and philosophical past while simultaneously placing this past in a distant future which seems to go even “beyond” the one imagined by Western writers. That is, finally China will be technologically superior to the West on account of its age-old moral and spiritual superiority.
Wang, Hui. “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China: The Concept of Science and Its Application in Modern Chinese Thought.” positions 3, 1 (1995): 1-68.
—–. “How to Explain ‘China” and Its ‘Modernity’: Rethinking The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought.” Tr. Wang Yang. In Wang Hui, The Politics of Imagining Asia. Ed. Theodore Huters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 63-94. Previously published as “The Liberation of the Object and the Interrogation of Modernity: Rethinking the Rise of Modern China.” Modern China 4, 1 (Jan. 2008): 114-40.
—–. “Weber and the Question of Chinese Modernity.” Tr. Theodore Huters. In Wang Hui, The Politics of Imagining Asia. Ed. Theodore Huters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 264-305.
Wang, Xiaoming. “From Petitions to Fiction: Visions of the Future Propagated in Early Modern China.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdan, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 43-56.
Wei, Yan. Detecting Chinese Modernities: Rupture and Continuity in Chinese Detective Fiction, 1896-1949. Leiden: Brill, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jeffrey Kinkley]
[Abstract: Yan Wei historicizes the two stages in the development of Chinese detective fiction and discusses the rupture and continuity in the cultural transactions, mediation, and appropriation that occurred when the genre of detective fiction traveled to China during the first half of the twentieth century. Wei identifies two divergent, or even opposite strategies for appropriating Western detective fiction during the late Qing and the Republican periods. She further argues that these two periods in the domestication of detective fiction were also connected by shared emotions. Both periods expressed ambivalent and sometimes contradictory views regarding Chinese tradition and Western modernity.]
Widmer, Ellen. Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016.
[Abstract: At the end of the Qing dynasty, works of fiction by male authors placed women in new roles. Fiction’s Family delves into the writings of one literary family from western Zhejiang whose works were emblematic of shifting attitudes toward women. The mother, Wang Qingdi, and the father, Zhan Sizeng, published their poems during the second half of the nineteenth century. Two of their four sons, Zhan Xi and Zhan Kai, wrote novels that promoted reforms in women’s lives. This book explores the intergenerational link, as well as relations between the sons, to find out how the conflicts faced by the parents may have been refigured in the novels of their sons. Its central question is about the brothers’ reformist attitudes. Were they based on the pronouncements of political leaders? Were they the result of trends in Shanghai publishing? Or did they derive from Wang Qingdi’s disappointment in her “companionate marriage,” as manifested in her poems? By placing one family at the center of this study, Ellen Widmer illuminates the diachronic bridge between the late Qing and the period just before it, the synchronic interplay of genres during the brothers’ lifetimes, and the interaction of Shanghai publishing with regions outside Shanghai.]
—–. “1861: Women Writers in Early Modern China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 103-108.
Wong, Wang-chi. “An Act of Violence: Translation of Western Fiction in the late Qing and early Republican Period.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 21-39.
Wright, David. “Yan Fu and the Tasks of the Translator.” In Lackner et al. eds., New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge and Lexical China in Late Imperial China. Boston, Koln: Leiden, 2001, 235-256.
Wu, Shengqing. “Gendering the Nation: The Proliferation of Images of Zhen Fei (1876-1900) and Sai Jinhua (1872-1936) in Late Qing and Republican China.” Nannu: Men, Women and Gender in China 11, 1 (2009): 1-64.
[Abstract: This paper analyzes the historical trajectories of the images of Zhen Fei and Sai Jinhua, who rose from an obscure royal concubine and an infamous prostitute, respectively, to become androgynous national heroines in wartime China. The study exposes the construction and the fictional elements of these images, thus providing concrete examples for establishing the interconnection between male fantasy and the invention of the modern national subject. It argues that the female body became the contested site for predominantly male-led discourses on eroticism and politics, and emphasizes that erotic desire may inform or enhance expressions and experiences of the formation of modern nationhood.]
—–. 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.]
—–. “Between Tradition and Modernity: Contested Classical Poetry.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 55-61.
—–. “1900, Summer and Fall: Fallen Leaves, Grieving Cicadas, and Poetic Mourning after the Boxer Rebellion.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 167-72.
—–. “1909, November 13: A Classical Poetry Society through Revolutionary Times.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 225-31.
—–. Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture. NY: Columbia University Press, 2020
[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.]
—–. “Lyrical Looking and World Visions in Late Qing Poetry on Overseas Journeys.” Prism 20, 1 (2023): 26-53.
[Abstract: Focusing on two sets of classical-style poems describing the experience of climbing up the Eiffel Tower and gazing upon the moon in exploratory overseas voyages, this contribution explores the visual imagination of the world (shijie) found in late Qing poetry. Instead of presenting an argument about the “revolutionary” transformation of classical poetry and poetics, this article shows how mediated poetic visions, fraught with complexity and tension, were a contested arena of conventional rhetoric and new travel experiences. It accordingly explores the underexamined terrain of the recurring tropes of “categorical associations” (lianlei ) and poetic empathy that structured late Qing poets’ encounters with the “new world.”]
Xiong, Yuezhi. “Degrees of Familiarity with the West in Late Qing Society.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdan, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 25-36.
Yang, Lianfen. “Late Qing Feminist Discourse and Nationalism.” Literature and Modern China 2, 1 (2022): 59-78.
[Abstract: Chinese feminist discourse began its development embedded within late Qing period nationalist dis-course in the form of proscriptions against foot-binding and advocacy for women’s education. Specific rhetorical terms conflating feminist and nationalist discourse include “mothers of citizens (guominzhimu)” and “women citizens (nüguomin).” This paper analyzes ways in which feminism was em-bedded in nationalist discourse and the legitimacy this established for the women’s movement. Such an inquiry uncovers the dependence of feminist discourse upon nationalist discourse, contributing to the unique development of feminism in China. This paper also looks at gender anxiety in Qiu Jin (1875-1907) in an attempt to describe how male subjectivity influenced late Qing feminist discourse.]
Yao, Dadui. “Translated Illustration and the Indigenization of Christianity in Late Qing Chinese Christian Novels.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10, 2 (2016): 255-86.
[Abstract: “Intersemiotic translation” is categorized by Roman Jakobson as one of three types of translation. Translation of illustrations in the late Qing novels, either directly from verbal signs or visual signs, can also be regarded as a typical kind of “intersemiotic translation.” The present article studies illustrations in Chinese Christian literature in the late Qing period, especially those in the Chinese translations of John Bunyan’s works, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War. Questions to ponder are how inter-semiotic translation occurs between these illustrations—in either transferring or transplanting the meanings from one sign system to another—and how it establishes its legitimacy through religious negotiation, ideological conflict, and cultural integration. The illustrations in the Chinese translation versions of The Pilgrim’s Progress manifest the translators’ and illustrators’ manipulation of repertoires of Chinese religious signs, thereby indigenizing a foreign religion. These illustrations, nevertheless, are not only associated with Christianity, but also with the long-lasting visual signs of Chinese culture. Hence these translated illustrations could be considered as a type of “Translated Christianity.”]
Yeh, Catherine Vance. “The Life-Style of Four Wenren in Late Qing Shanghai.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 57, 1 (1997): 419-70. [deals with Wang Tao, Chen Jitong, Zeng Pu, and Jin Songcen]
—–. “Creating the Urban Beauty: The Shanghai Courtesan in Late Qing Illustrations.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 397-447.
—–. Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1911. Seattle: University of Washington, 2006.
[Abstract: In this fascinating book, Catherine Yeh explores the Shanghai entertainment world at the close of the Qing dynasty. Established in the 1850s outside of the old walled city, the Shanghai Foreign Settlements were administered by Westerners and so were not subject to the strict authority of the Chinese government. At the center of the dynamic new culture that emerged was the courtesan, whose flamboyant public lifestyle and conspicuous consumption of modern goods set a style that was emulated by other women as they emerged from the “inner quarters” of traditional Chinese society.]
—–. The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng]
[Abstract: The political novel, which enjoyed a steep yet short rise to international renown between the 1830s and the 1910s, is primarily concerned with the nation’s political future. It offers a characterization of the present, a blueprint of the future, and the image of the heroes needed to get there. With the standing it gained during its meteoric rise, the political novel helped elevate the novel altogether to become the leading literary genre of the twentieth century worldwide. Focusing on its adaptation in the Chinese context, Yeh traces the genre from Disraeli’s England through Europe and the United States to East Asia. Her study goes beyond comparative approaches and nation-state- and language-centered histories of literature to examine the intrinsic connections among literary works. Through detailed studies, especially of the Chinese exemplars, Yeh explores the tensions characteristic of transcultural processes: the dynamics through which a particular, and seemingly local, literary genre goes global; the ways in which such a globalized literary genre maintains its core features while assuming local identity and interacting with local audiences and political authorities; and the relationship between the politics of form and the role of politics in literary innovation.]
—–. “Recasting the Chinese Novel: Ernest Major’s Shenbao Publishing House (1872-1890).” Transcultural Studies 6, 1 (2015): 171-289.
Yu, Chu Chi. “Lord Byron’s ‘The Isles of Greece: First Translations.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdan, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 79-104.
Yuan, Jin. “The Origin of the Westernized Vernacular Chinese Baihuawen: A Re-evaluation of the Influence of Western Missionaries on Chinese Literature.” Tr. Wang Keyou. Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 3, 2 (2009): 247–269.
Zamperini, Paola. “Elective Affinities: Literary Soulmates and the Marketplace in late Qing Fiction.” Late Imperial China 28, 1 (July 2007): 62-91.
—–. Lost Bodies. Prostitution and Masculinity in late Qing Fiction. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
[Abstract: This important contribution to the study of early modern Chinese fiction and representation of gender relations focuses on literary representations of the prostitute produced in the Ming and Qing periods. Following her heavily symbolic body, the present work maps this fictional heroine’s journey from innocence to sex-work and beyond. This crucial angle allows the author to paint a picture of gender identity, sexuality, and desire that is at once unitary and multi-layered, and that comes to illuminate some of the major themes in the construction of Chinese modernity. ]
Zhang, Yun. “Feminisim in the Vernacular: Baihua Writing, Gender, and Identity in Late Qing China.” Twentieth-Century China 45, 1 (2020): 85-104.
[Abstract: This article explores the significant yet neglected role of women as active practitioners of baihua writing, a newly created vernacular journalistic style, in the context of nationalism in early twentieth-century China. While nationalist vernacular journalists of the time constructed baihua as a utilitarian medium for nationalist propaganda and the lower classes, women vernacular writers appropriated this nationalism-inflected, class-based style as a new mode of vernacular writing aligned with progressiveness and their advocacy of feminism. Examining a of feminist vernacular journalistic writings penned by Chinese female overseas students in Japan, this paper shows how these feminist vernacular journalists sought to develop baihua to empower their expression of feminism and to redress and transcend Chinese women’s subjugated feminine condition in the context of nationalism. Through this articulation of vernacular feminism, the feminist vernacular writers attempted to create a new national collective identity as actors of sociopolitical practice for Chinese women.]
Zhu, Ping. “The Chinese Exclusion Act and The Late Qing Chinese Cosmopolitanism.” Comparative Literature Studies 58, 4 (2021): 863–890.
Zhu, Yun. Imagining Sisterhood in Modern Chinese Texts, 1890-1937. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017.
[Abstract: This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”]
Zimmer, Thomas. “Selective Outlooks on the World: The Problem of Exoticism in Chinese Novels from the Turn of the 19th and 20th Century.” Monumenta Serica 54 (2006): 269-78.
Zou, John. “Travel and Translation: An Aspect of China’s Cultural Modernity, 1862-1926.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998, 133-51.
May Fourth (1911-1925) / Early Republic
Airaksinen, Tiina. “Imperialism and Nationalism as May Fourth Movement Discourses.” Studia Orientalia Electronica 2 (2014): 1-15.
[Abstract: This article analyses those imperialist and national discourses that the Chinese and the British constructed, particularly during the May Fourth Movement, in China in the 1910s and 1920s. Moreover, the paper explores the form, content, and impact of May Fourth rhetoric on national identity, concentrating on the cultural, historical, and political dimensions of nationalism presented in China. It is clear that the May Fourth protestors, especially urban and educated men, dominated public articulations of national identities. With their control of knowledge production, and in some cases control of state bureaucracies, elite men were able to make demands for the nation, often combining their own group needs with specific definitions of the nation. British discourse that was constructed during the May Fourth Movement responded to a reality that was infinitely adaptable in its function of preserving the basic structures of imperial power. For the British, the May Fourth demonstrators represented a potential change in the level of existing intellectual, political, social, and economic stability, which for decades had guaranteed the British a privileged position in the country. As result, discussions on nationalism and imperialism became a crucial part of the Sino- British May Fourth Movement discourse.]
Anderson, Marsten. The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Biasco, Margherita. “The Crisis of the Family System and the Search for a New Identity of Chinese Youth.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 189-200.
Bing, Sang. “The Divergence and Convergence of China’s Written and Spoken Languages: Reassessing the Vernacular Language During the May Fourth Period.” Twentieth-Century China 38, 1 (Jan. 2013): 71-93.
[Abstract: The development of the vernacular language during the New Culture Movement was only intended as a transitional stage to the goal of abolishing the Chinese language. Intellectuals such as Qian Xuantong, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, and Chen Duxiu all advocated to varying degrees the Romanization, Latinization, and abolition of the Chinese language. Chen Yinke, however, argued that the adoption of a Europeanized grammatical structure, and the borrowing of neologisms from abroad, such as Japan, altered the fundamental property of Chinese as an independent language. Reassessing the language reform of the May Fourth today, it is evident that the development of the simplified character, the vernacular language, and the pinyin did not achieve the goal of unifying the spoken and written Chinese. Instead by eliminating the classical language, the language reform removed the ability of the vernacular-speaking masses to create a literature of the written words.]
Boittout, Joachim. The Forgotten 1910s 尋找辛亥文風. (A blog on “literature and democracy in early Republican China 民國初年言情文學與民主建設”).
[Abstract: This website is conceived as a translation platform for long ignored literary pieces of the early 1910s. Its main purpose is to provide China focused scholars and students with a representative selection of famous literary works of that time, which covers the end of the Qing empire and the first years of the Republican era. Most of the pieces translated here were written in Classical Chinese, usually in the elite form of pianwen 駢文 (paralleled prose), and serialized in political newspapers such as People’s Rights (Minquanbao 民權報, 1912-1914). It focusses on “early Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” (1912-1918) writers. This group, contrary to others novelists and writers often conveniently gathered under the deceptive label “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies,” manifested and claimed a sense of unity. Acting as leading figures of this group were Xu Zhenya 徐枕亞 (1889-1937), Wu Shuangre 吳雙熱 (1885-1934), Xu Tianxiao 徐天嘯 (1886-1941), Li Dingyi 李定夷 (1890-1963), and Liu Tieleng 劉鐵冷 (1881-1961).]
Braester, Yomi. “Dreaming a Cure for History: The Resistance to Historical Consciousness Within the May Fourth Movement.” In Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003, 31-55.
Button, Peter. Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity. Leiden: Brill, 2009. [MCLC Resource Center review by Thomas Moran]
[Abstract: The emergence of the Chinese socialist realist novel can best be understoodin light of the half-century long formation of the modern concept ofliterature in China. Globalized in the wake of modern capitalism, literary modernity configures the literary text in a relationship to both modern philosophy and literary theory. This book traces China’s unique, complex, and creative articulation of literary modernity beginning with Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q.” Cai Yi’s aesthetic theory of the type (dianxing) and the image (xingxiang) is then explored in relation to global currents in literary thought and philosophy, making possible a fundamental rethinking of Chinese socialist realist novels like Yang Mo’s Song of Youth and Luo Guangbin and Yan Yiyan’s Red Crag.]
Cai, Keru. “The Spatiality of Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism.” Comparative Literature 75, 3 (2023): 327-47.
[Abstract: Early twentieth-century Chinese realist depictions of indoor space, such as the crowded tenement house and the penniless writer’s abode, enabled the portrayal of the physical and psychological exigencies of poverty. This set of narrative concerns arose in a period when Chinese writers were preoccupied with the alleged material and cultural poverty of China in comparison to the West. To remedy this purported backwardness, Chinese writers appropriated from foreign literatures, especially Russian realism, narrative themes and techniques such as the use of metonymy in the depiction of spatiality, the figure of the impoverished flâneur-like urban perambulator, and the very topic of poverty itself. This gave rise to innovative forms of modern Chinese narrative, tracing the spatial, material, and bodily experience of poverty in painstaking detail. In particular, I examine how Yu Dafu elaborates on literary elements from Russia in his 1924 story “Nights of Spring Fever,” which deploys the metonymic confines of impoverished, narrow spaces in order to explore wider topics of social class and transcultural encounter.]
Cai, Yuanpei. “The May Fourth Spirit, Now and Then.” China Heritage Quarterly 17 (March 2009).
Chan, Adrian. “Towards a Marxist Theory and Sociology of Literature in China, to 1933.” In Wang Gungwu, ed., Society and the Writer: Essays on Literature in Modern Asia. Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian Nat. Univ., 1981, 155-171.
Chang, Shuei-May, ed. Casting Off the Shackles of Family : Ibsen’s Nora Figure in Modern Chinese Literature, 1918-1942. Peter Lang, 2002.
Chao, Anne. “Introduction: Re-engaging and Re-generating the May Fourth.” Twentieth-Century China 38, 1 (Jan. 2013): 1-4.
Chen, Janet. “In Search of a Standard National Language in Republican China.” In Ori Sela, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2023.
—–. The Sounds of Mandarin: Learning to Speak a National Language in China and Taiwan, 1913-1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world today. In China, a country with a vast array of regional and local vernaculars, how was this “common language” forged? How did people learn to speak Mandarin? And what does a focus on speech instead of script reveal about Chinese language and history? This book traces the surprising social history of China’s spoken standard, from its creation as the national language of the early Republic in 1913 to its journey into postwar Taiwan to its reconfiguration as the common language of the People’s Republic after 1949. Janet Y. Chen examines the process of linguistic change from multiple perspectives, emphasizing the experiences of ordinary people. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, a chorus of influential elites promoted the goal of a strong China speaking in one unified voice. Chen explores how this vision fared in practice, showing the complexities of transforming an ideological aspiration into spoken reality. She tracks linguistic change in schools, rural areas, and urban life against the backdrop of war and revolution. The Sounds of Mandarin draws on a novel aural archive of early twentieth-century sound technology, including phonograph recordings, films, and radio broadcasts. Following the uneven trajectory of standard speech, this book sheds new light on the histories of language, nationalism, and identity in China and Taiwan.]
Chen, Jianhua. “Zhou Shoujuan’s Love Stories and Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly Fiction.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 354-63. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 111-20.
—–. “Canon Formation and Linguistic Turn: Literary Debates in Republican China, 1919-1949.” In Kai-Wing Chow, Tze-ki Hon, Hung-yok Ip, and Don C. Price, eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search for Chinese Modernity. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008, 51-67.
—–. “An Archaeology of Repressed Popularity: Zhou Shoujuan, Mao Dun, and their 1920s Literary Polemics.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, eds., Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon. NY: Routledge, 2009, 91-114.
—–. “Revolution: From Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature.” In Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 15-32.
Chen, Joseph. The May Fourth Movement in Shanghai. Leiden: Brill, 1971.
Chen, Pingyuan. “Literature High and Low: ‘Popular Fiction’ in Twentieth-Century China.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 113-33.
—–. Touches of History: An Entry into “May Fourth” China. Trs. Michel Hockx, with Maria af Sandelberg, Uganda Sze Pui Kwan, Chistopher Neil Payne and Christopher Rosenmeier. Leiden: Brill, 2011. [MCLC Resource Center review by Tze-ki Hon]
[Abstract: The “May Fourth Movement” of 1919 is generally seen as the central event in China’s transformation from the traditional to the modern. It signalled the arrival of effective student activism on the political scene; it heralded the success of outspoken anti-imperialist ideologies; its slogans and pamphlets demonstrated the rhetorical qualities of the new vernacular writing; some of its participants went on to become leading cultural and political figures; it is said to have given birth to the Communist Party. The latter aspect has ensured that a particular narrative of the movement remained enshrined in official Chinese state ideology for many decades, a narrative often opposed by those outside China for similarly ideological reasons. No movement in modern Chinese history and culture has been more researched, yet none has been less understood. This award-winning book, by one of Peking University’s most famous professors, represents a groundbreaking attempt to return to a study of “May Fourth” that is solidly grounded in historical fact. Favouring smaller stories over grand narratives, concentrating on unknown, marginal materials rather than familiar key documents, and highlighting “May Fourth”‘s indebtedness to the cultural debates of the preceding late Qing period, Chen Pingyuan reconstructs part of the actual historical scenery, demonstrating the great variety of ideas expressed during those tumultuous decades.]
Chen, Sihe. “The Avant-garde Elements in the May Fourth New Literature Movement.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 1, 2 (May 2007): 163-96.
[Abstract: The May Fourth “new literature” appeared in the early twentieth century China while the avant-garde was sweeping over the West. Both could be defined as radical literary movements by such characteristics as storming criticism of politics, subversive standpoints on traditional culture, language experiments for thoroughly novel forms and criticism with the aestheticism for l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake). The avant-garde elements in the new literature, by contrast, are believed able to help us see two kinds of shifts in the course of twentieth-century literature, that is, to see how it shifted from classical to modern literature in the last century: one change was the natural flow of the mainstream literature, subject to the social development and changes, and the other is an avant-garde movement that took a radical stance against the status quo, and was led by ideals of social reforms aiming to realize beyond the generation.]
Cheng, Ching-mao. “The Impact of Japanese Literary Trends.” In Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977, 63-88.
Chiang, Yung-chen. “Hu Shi and the May Fourth Legacy.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds. Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and Its Centennial Legacy. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 113-36.
Chou, Chih-p’ing. “Utopian Language: From Esperanto to the Abolishment of Chinese Characters.” In Carlos Yu-Kai Lin and Victor H. Mair, eds., Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and Its Legacy. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 247-64.
Chow, Kai-Wing, Tze-Ki Hon, and Hung-You Ip, eds. Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity. Lexington Books, 2008.
[Abstract: When did China make the decisive turn from tradition to modernity? For decades, the received wisdom would have pointed to the May Fourth movement, with its titanic battles between the champions of iconoclasm and the traditionalists, and its shift to more populist forms of politics. A growing body of recent research has, however, called into question how decisive the turn was, when it happened, and what relation the resulting modernity bore to the agendas of people who might have considered themselves representatives of such an iconoclastic movement. Having thus explicitly or implicitly ‘decentered’ the May Fourth, such research (augmented by contributions in the present volume) leaves us with the task of accounting for the shape Chinese modernity took, as the product of dialogues and debates between, and the interplay of, a variety of actors and trends, both within and (certainly no less importantly) without the May Fourth camp.]
Chow, Tse-tsung. “Anti-Confucianism in Early Republican China.” In Arthur Wright, ed., The Confucian Persuasion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967.
—–. The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960.
Chow, William C. L. “The Development of Individualism in Modern China.” Hanxue yanjiu (Chinese Studies). 13, 2 (1995): 77-98.
Chung, Hilary. “Kristevan (Mis)understandings: Writing in the Feminine.” In Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits, eds., Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary Theory. New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, 72-91. [analyzes fiction by Chen Hengzhe, Lu Yin, Ding Ling, and Feng Yuanjun]
Chung, Hilary and Tommy McClellan, “Images of Women: Exploring Apparent Changes of Attitude Towards Women in the May 4th Era Through Literary Imagery.” In Viviane Alleton and Alexeï Volkov eds., Notions et Perceptions du Changement en Chine. Paris: College de France, 1994, 187-198.
Cini, Francesca. “Le ‘problem des femmes’ dans La nouvelle jeunesse, 1915-1922″ (The women’s problem in New Youth, 1915-1922). Etudes chinoies 5, 1/2 (Spring/Autumn 1986): 133-56.
Crespi, John. “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 Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 121-27.
Culp, Robert. “Teaching Baihua: Textbooks, Publishing, and the Production of Vernacular Language and New Literary Canon in Early Twentieth-Century China.” Twentieth-Century China 34, 1 (2009): 4-41.
Daruvala, Susan. Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000.
Davies, Gloria. “Towards Transcendental Knowledge: The Mapping of the May Fourth Modernity/Spirit.” East Asian History 4 (1992): 143-64.
—–. “May Fourth as Affect.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds. Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and Its Centennial Legacy. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 25-52.
Denton, Kirk A. “Introduction.” In Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996, 1-61.
Des Forges, Alexander. Street Talk and Alley Stories: Tangled Narratives of Shanghai from Lives of Shanghai Flowers (1892) to Midnight (1933). Ph.D. diss. Princeton: Princeton University, 1998.
—–. Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Chris Berry]
Detwyler, Anatoly. “Distant Reading” and the Pull of Literary Abstraction in New Culture China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 33, 2 (Fall 2021): 1-48.
Dirlik, Arif. “Ideology and Organization in the May Fourth Movement: Some Problems in the Intellectual Historiography of the May Fourth Period.” Republican China 12, 1 (Nov. 1986): 3-19.
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.
Dolezelova-Velingerova, Milena and Oldrich Kral, eds. The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001.
Dooling, Amy D. Feminism and Narrative Strategies in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Women’s Writing. Ph.D. Diss. NY: Columbia University, 1998.
—–. “Reconsidering the Origins of Modern Chinese Women’s Writing.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 371-77. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 128-35.
—–. Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. [contains the following chapters: (1) National imaginaries : feminist fantasies at the turn of the century; (2) The new woman’s women; (3) Love and/or revolution? : fictions of the feminine self in the 1930s cultural left; (4) Outwitting patriarchy : comic narrative strategies in the works of Yang Jiang, Su Qing, and Zhang Ailing; (5) A world still to win]
Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation:Questions and Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. [see also “Symposium on Prasenjit Duara’s Rescuing History from the Nation.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1997)].
Eastman, Lloyd E. “The May Fourth Movement as a Historical Turning Point: Ecological Exhaustion, Militarization, and Other Causes of China’s Modern Crisis.” In K. Lieberthal et al., eds., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991, 123-38.
Eber, Irene. “Images of Oppressed Peoples and Modern Chinese Literature.” In Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977, 17-36.
Eide, Elizabeth. “The Balad of Kongque dongnan fei as Freudian Feminist Drama during the May Fourth Period.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 129-38.
Elvin, Mark. Self-Liberation and Self-Immolation in Modern Chinese Thought. Canberra: Australian National University, 1978.
Feng, Jin. The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2004. [“Introduction to The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction.” Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6, 4 (Dec. 2004).]
Feng, Liping. “Democracy and Elitism: The May Fourth Ideal of Literature.” Modern China 20, 2 (Winter 1994): 328-56.
Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei. “Reconsidering Xueheng: Neo-Conservatism in Early Republican China.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 137-70.
Fincher, John H. “The Writ of Literature: The Chinese Disciples of Western New Humanism, ca.1919-1933.” In Wang Gungwu ed., Society and the Writer: Essays on Literature in Modern Asia. Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian Nat. Univ., 1981, 139-153.
Findeisen, Raoul David. “From Literature to Love: Glory and Decline of the Love-Letter Genre.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 79-112.
Fitzgerald, John. Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution. Stanford: SUP, 1996.
Fogel, Joshua A. “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, 2 (1989): 575-602.
Forster, Elisabeth. “From Academic Nitpicking to a ‘New Culture Movement’: How Newspapers Turned Academic Debates into the Center of ‘May Fourth.'” Frontiers of History in China 9, 4 (2014): 534-557.
[Abstract: In early 1919, people like Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu were regarded as members of an ivory-tower “academic faction” (xuepai), embroiled in a debate with an opposing “faction.” After the May Fourth demonstrations, they were praised as the stars of a “New Culture Movement.” However, it was not obvious how the circle around Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu was associated with the May Fourth demonstrations. This link hinged on the way in which newspapers like Shenbao reported about the academic debates and the political events of May Fourth. After compartmentalizing the debating academics into fixed xuepai, Shenbao ascribed warlord-political allegiances to them. These made the Hu-Chen circle look like government victims and their “factional” rivals like the warlords’ allies. When the atmosphere became hostile to the government during May Fourth, Hu Shi’s “faction” became associated with the equally victimized May Fourth demonstrators. Their ideas were regarded as (now popular) expressions of anti-government sentiment, and soon this was labeled the core of the “New Culture Movement.” The idea and rhetoric of China’s “New Culture Movement” in this way emerged out of the fortuitous concatenation of academic debates, newspaper stories, and political events.]
—–. 1919 – The Year That Changed China: A New History of the New Culture Movement. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2017.
[Abstract: Interpreting the New Culture Movement in light of a new understanding of Republican Chinese society reached in the past two decades, this book includes empirical studies of famous intellectuals like Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu, of metropolitan and provincial newspapers, student essays, advertisements, textbooks and diaries to analyze how the ‘New Culture Movement’, as a buzzword, changed the course of Chinese cultural history.]
Forster, Elisabeth. “The Buzzword ‘New Culture Movement’: Intellectual Marketing Strategies in China in the 1910s and 1920s.” Modern Asian Studies 51, 5 (2017): 1253–82.
Fried, Daniel. “Conservative Modernizers: The Origins of the Critical Review Group.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds.. New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2025, 113-29.
Fruehauf, Heinrich. Urban Exoticism in Modern Chinese Literature, 1910-1933. Ph.D. diss. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990.
Furth, Charlotte. “May Fourth in History.” In Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973, 59-68.
—–. “Intellectual Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895-1920.” In Merle Goldman an Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds., An Intellectual History of Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 13-96.
Galik, Marian. “May Fourth Literature Reconsidered: Musing Over Mythopeia as Creation.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 269-83.
Gao, Jie. Saving the Nation through Culture: The Folklore Movement in Republican China. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019.
[Abstract: The Modern Chinese Folklore Movement burst onto the scene at National Peking University between 1918 and 1926. A group of literary scholars, inspired by Western thought, turned to the study and revitalization of folklore – popular songs, beliefs, and customs – to rally the people around the flag during an era of deep postwar disillusionment. Saving the Nation through Culture opens a new chapter in the world history of the folklore movement by exploring the origins and evolution of the discipline’s Chinese branch. Gao reveals that intellectuals in the New Culture Movement influenced the founding folklorists with their aim to repudiate Confucianism following the Chinese Republic’s failure to modernize the nation. The folklorists, however, faced a unique challenge – advocating for modern academic methods and constructions while upholding folklore as the key to the nation’s salvation.]
Ge, Baoquan. “The Influence of Russian Classical Literature on Modern Chinese Literature Before and After the May Fourth Movement.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 213-22.
Ge, Hongbin 葛红兵. “Wusi wenhua de neizai maodun” 五四文化的内在矛盾 (Inherent contradictions of May Fourth culture). Confucius2000. [in Chinese]
Gimpel, Denise. “Beyond Butterflies: Some Observations on the Early Years of the Journal Xiaoshuo yuebao.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 40-60.
—–. Lost Voices of Modernity: A Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.
Goldman, Merle, ed. Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Boston: Harvard University Press. 1977.
—–. “Left-wing Criticism of the Pai Hua Movement.” In Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973, 85-94.
Glosser, Susan L. “‘The Truths I Have Learned’: Nationalism, Family Reform, and Male Identity in China’s New Culture Movement, 1915-1923 .” In Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, eds. Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 120-44.
Goodman, Bryna. The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Joan Judge]
Grieder, Jerome. “The Question of Politics in the May Fourth Era.” In Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973, 95-102.
Guan, Aihe. “The Traditional and Modern Conflicts of the Literary Innovation at the Threshold of the 20th Century.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 2, 4 (Dec. 2008): 583-98.
Guo, Shuanglin. “Telegraphy and Political Time: A Reinterpretation of the May Fourth Incident of 1919.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds.. New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2025, 32-86.
Guo, Yanli. “An Introduction to Modern Chinese Female Literature.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 3, 2 (2003): 109-22.
Haapanen, Jarko. “New World Trends in May Fourth Movement Journals.” In Jana S. Rošker and Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik, eds., Modernisation of Chinese Culture: Continuity and Change. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, 47-70.
Hanan, Patrick. Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. NY: Columbia UP, 2004.
[Abstract: It has often been said that the nineteenth century was a relatively stagnant period for Chinese fiction, but preeminent scholar Patrick Hanan shows that the opposite is true: the finest novels of the nineteenth century show a constant experimentation and evolution. In this collection of detailed and insightful essays, Hanan examines Chinese fiction before and during the period in which Chinese writers first came into contact with western fiction. Hanan explores the uses made of fiction by westerners in China; the adaptation and integration of western methods in Chinese fiction; and the continued vitality of the Chinese fictional tradition. Some western missionaries, for example, wrote religious novels in Chinese, almost always with the aid of native assistants who tended to change aspects of the work to “fit” Chinese taste. Later, such works as Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Jonathan Swift’s “A Voyage to Lilliput,” the novels of Jules Verne, and French detective stories were translated into Chinese. These interventions and their effects are explored here for virtually the first time. Contents: (1) The Narrator’s Voice Before the “Fiction Revolution”; (2) Illusion of Romance and the Courtesan Novel; (3) The Missionary Novels of the Nineteenth Century; (4) The First Novel Translated Into Chinese; (5) The Translated Fiction in the Early Shen Bao; (6) The New Novel Before the New Novel—John Fryer’s Fiction Contest; (7) The Second Stage of Vernacular Translation; (8) Wu Jianren and the Narrator; (9) Specific Literary Relations of Sea of Regret; (10) The Autobiographical Romance of Chen Diexian; (11) The Technique of Lu Xun’s Fiction]
Harbsmeier, Christopher. “May Fourth Linguistic Orthodoxy and Rhetoric: Some Informal Comparative Notes.” In Lackner et al. eds., New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge and Lexical China in Late Imperial China. Boston, Koln: Leiden, 2001, 373-410.
Hay, Stephen N. Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China and India. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970.
Hockx, Michel. “Mad Women and Mad Men: Intraliterary Contact in Early Republican Literature.” In Findeison and Gassmann, eds., Autumn Floods: Essays in Honour of Marian Galik. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997.
—–. “Playing the Field: Aspects of Chinese Literary Life in the 1920s.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 61-78.
—–. “Is There a May Fourth Literature? A Reply to Wang Xiaoming.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, 2 (Fall 1999): 40-52.
—–. Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911-1937. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003. [MCLC Resource Center review by Edward M. Gunn]
—–. “Theory as Practice: Modern Chinese Literature and Bourdieu.” In Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits, eds., Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary Theory. New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, 220-39.
—–. “The Chinese Literary Association (Wenxue yanjiu hui).” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 79-102.
—–. “What’s in a Date? May Fourth in Modern Chinese Literary History.” In Olga Lomova, ed., Conference to Mark the Centenary of Jaroslav Prusek. Prague, 2008, 291-306.
—–. “1919, May 4: The Big Misnomer: ‘May Fourth Literature.'” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 265-71.
—–. “The Shandong Question.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds.. New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2025, 14-31.
Hon, Tze-ki. “National Essence, National Learning, and Culture: Historical Writings in Guocui xuebao, Xueheng, and Guoxue jikan.” Historiography East and West 1, 2 (2003): 241-86.
—–. “Cultural Identity and Local Self-Government: A Study of Liu Yizheng’s History of Chinese Culture.” Modern China 30, 4 (Oct. 2004): 506-542.
[Abstract: Until recently, the study of Chinese historical writings of the 1920s and 1930s has centered on the May Fourth approach to history, especially the Doubting Antiquity Movement (yigu yundong) led by Gu Jiegang. By privileging their historical writings as modern or progressive and labeling their opponents’ as traditional or regressive, we fail to see the full scope of the modern Chinese historical debate and overlook its social and political underpinnings. In this article, based on a close reading of History of Chinese Culture (Zhongguo wenhua shi) of Liu Yizheng (1880-1956), the author seeks to contextualize the historical debate in terms of the political and social change in post-1911 China. Written in the early 1920s when intellectuals still could express different views of the nation without the fear of state censorship, Liu’s History of Chinese Culture gave renewed emphasis to local self-government, thereby challenging the expansion of the state.]
—–. “1922, March: Turning Babbitt into Bai Bide.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 277-82.
Hu, Ying. Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1898-1918. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
—–. “Naming the First New Woman.” NAN NÜ: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 3, 2 2001).
Huang, Nicole. “War, Revolution, and Urban Transformation: Chinese Literature of the Republican Era, 1920s-1940s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 54-66.
Huang, Sung-k’ang. “The May Fourth Legacy and the Process of Chinese Democracy (1915-1989).” Revue des Pays de l’Est 1/2 (1992).
Hummel, Arthur W. “The New Cultue Movement in China.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 152 (Nov., 1930): 55-62
Hung, Chang-tai. Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918-1937. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1985.
Hunt, Michael H. “The May Fourth Era: China’s Place in the World.” In K. Lieberthal et al., eds., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991, 178-200.
Huters, Theodore. “Critcal Ground: The Transformation of the May Fourth Era.” In Bonnie McDougall, ed., Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China. Berkeley: UCP, 1984, 54-80.
—–. “The Paradox of Chinese Iconoclasm,” in Nancy Kobrin, ed., The Paradigm Exchange II, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts, 1987, 13- 18.
—–. “Between Praxis and Essence: The Search for Cultural Expression in the Chinese Revolution.” In Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner eds., Marxism and the Chinese Experience. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989, 316-37.
—–. Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. [MCLC Resource Center review by Bonnie S. McDougall]
—–. Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Nathaniel Isaacson]
[Abstract: Modernity, modernization, modernism, and the modern have all been key, interrelated terms in post-traditional China. For all their ubiquity, however, in previous studies of Chinese culture and society there has been insufficient clarity as to what the precise meanings each term has encompassed from the period beginning in 1895, the year of China’s catastrophic defeat by Japan. The importance of these terms is underlined by their implication in China’s positioning in the world over the course of the past century and a half, as well as the path China will follow in the future. Looking into a set of concepts and practices that have been instrumental in China’s road to modernity, namely, the definition of the modern itself, a new notion of literature, linguistic reform, translation, popular culture, and the transformation of the publishing world, Taking China to the World explores the various ways in which activity in the cultural sphere shaped Chinese perceptions of both how its historical course might evolve and how all-compassing change needed to be managed. Most studies of China’s modern transformation have implicitly based themselves on the inevitability of a process of cultural, social, and institutional rationalization, more often than not based on Western models, without grappling with the full extent of the struggles to reconcile needed changes with a grand tradition, which, for all the condemnation aimed at it after 1895, still held a powerful appeal for most of those who seriously considered the full extent of the interactions between new and old. That an idea of a monolithic new seemed to take hold of many members of the Chinese elite after the period circa 1920 does not rule out the subtle hold that key portions of the grand tradition have had over modern China. No other book offers this kind of analysis of both the historical origins and contemporary consequences of the agonizing choices made by actors in the cultural sphere who occupied core positions in the life of the Chinese nation.]
Ip, Hung-Yok, Tze-ki Hon, and Chiu-Chun Lee. “The Plurality of Chinese Modernity: A Review of Recent Scholarship on the May Fourth Movement.” Modern China 29, 4 (Oct. 2003): 490-509.
Ishii, Tsuyoshi. “The ‘Li’ against ‘Lijiao’: Reinterpretation of Confucian Classics for Radical Transformation of the Modern.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds.. New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2025, 130-46.
Jenco, Leigh. “Culture as History: Envisioning Change Across and Beyond ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Civilizations in the May Fourth Era.” Twentieth-Century China 38, 1 (Jan. 2013): 34-52.
[Abstract: This essay examines an influential debate that took place during China’s May Fourth era (circa 1915-1927) concerning the character of “Eastern” and “Western” civilizations. In this debate, both moderates and radicals wrestle with a growing awareness that cultures have not only a spatial existence but also a historical career, which has encouraged the development of certain institutions and attitudes and discouraged others. Spatial terms mark not only the places where knowledge circulates, but also the particular pasts-and thus futures-toward which Chinese thinkers align themselves. This way of figuring “East” and “West” enables May Fourth thinkers to do more than sort civilizational characteristics into categories of the inevitably universal and the irredeemably particular, as many commentators have assumed. It also facilitates the travel of cultural products and practices across the spatial as well as temporal boundaries originally seen to contain them.]
Jensen, Lionel. “Particular is Universal: Hu Shi, Ru, and the Chinese Transcendence of Nationalism.” In Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization. Durham: Duke UP, 1998, 217-64.
Jin, Li. “Theater of Pathos: Sentimental Melodramas in the New Drama Legacy.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 2 (Fall 2012): 94-128.
Jin, Yuan. “The Influence of Translated Fiction on Chinese Romantic Ficiton.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdan, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 283-302.
Jones, Andrew F. Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
[Abstract: In 1992 Deng Xiaoping famously declared, “Development is the only hard imperative.” What ensued was the transformation of China from a socialist state to a capitalist market economy. The spirit of development has since become the prevailing creed of the People’s Republic, helping to bring about unprecedented modern prosperity, but also creating new forms of poverty, staggering social upheaval, physical dislocation, and environmental destruction. In Developmental Fairy Tales, Andrew F. Jones asserts that the groundwork for this recent transformation was laid in the late nineteenth century, with the translation of the evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, and Spencer into Chinese letters. He traces the ways that the evolutionary narrative itself evolved into a form of vernacular knowledge which dissolved the boundaries between beast and man and reframed childhood development as a recapitulation of civilizational ascent, through which a beleaguered China might struggle for existence and claim a place in the modern world-system. This narrative left an indelible imprint on China’s literature and popular media, from children’s primers to print culture, from fairy tales to filmmaking. Jones’s analysis offers an innovative and interdisciplinary angle of vision on China’s cultural evolution. He focuses especially on China’s foremost modern writer and public intellectual, Lu Xun, in whose work the fierce contradictions of his generation’s developmentalist aspirations became the stuff of pedagogical parable. Developmental Fairy Tales revises our understanding of literature’s role in the making of modern China by revising our understanding of developmentalism’s role in modern Chinese literature.]
Judge, Joan. “Blended Wish Images: Chinese and Western Exemplary Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Nan Nu: Men, Women, and Gender in China 6, 1 (2004).
Kaske, Elisabeth. “Mandarin, Vernacular and National Language–China’s Emerging Concept of a National Language in the Early Twentieth Century.” In Lackner, Michael and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds. Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 265-304.
—–. The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 1895-1919. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
[Abstract: The study examines the origins of the “literary revolution” proclaimed in 1917 which laid the foundation for the replacement of the classical language by the vernacular as China’s national language and medium of national literature. A unique, multifaceted approach is used to explain the political significance of the classical/vernacular divide against the backdrop of social change that followed the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5. Seeing education as the central battleground for all debates on language, the study in six thoroughly documented chapters investigates the language policy of the Qing and Republican governments, vernacular journalism of the revolutionaries, the activities of urban script reformers, the linguistic thought of the national essence advocates, and the emergence of a scholarly interest in the vernacular in academic circles.]
Keaveney, Christopher T. The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature: The Creation Society’s Reinvention of the Japanese Shishosetsu. NY: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2004.
Kenley, David L. New Culture in a New World: The May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Diaspora in Singapore, 1919-1932. London: Routledge, 2003.
Kindler, Benjamin. “Labor Romanticism against Modernity: The Creation Society as Socialist Avant-Garde.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 2 (Fall 2020), 43-99.
Kiyama, Hideo. “The ‘Literary Renaissance’ and the ‘Literary Revolution.'” Acta Asiatica 72 (1997): 27-60.
Knight, D. Sabina. “Agency Beyond Subjectivity: The Unredeemed Project of May Fourth Fiction.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 1, 2 (Jan. 1998): 1-36.
—–. “The Prison of Self-Consciousness in May Fourth Fiction.” In The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006, 73-103.
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.
Kung, Robert Lion. “Metaphysics and East-West Philosophy: Applying the Chinese T’i-yung Paradigm.” Philosophy East and West 29, 1 (Jan. 1979): 551-71.
Kuo, Ya-pei. Debating Culture in Interwar China. NY: Routledge, 2010.
—–. “The Making of the New Culture Movement: A Discursive History.” Twentieth-Century China 42, 1 (Jan. 2017): 52-71.
Kwok, D.W.Y. Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965.
Lahiri, Madhumita. “Print for the People: Tagore, China, and the Bengali Vernacular.” Comparative Literature 70, 2 (2018): 145-59.
Lanza, Fabio. “The Beijing University Students in the May Fourth in Era: A Collective Biography.” In Kenneth J. Hammond and Kristen Stapleton, eds., The Human Tradition in Modern China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008, 117-34.
—–. Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing. NY: Columbia University Press, 2010.
[Abstract: Through an investigation of twentieth-century Chinese student protest, Fabio Lanza considers the marriage of the cultural and the political, the intellectual and the quotidian, that occurred during the May Fourth movement, along with its rearticulation in subsequent protest. Lanza returns to the May Fourth period (1917-1923) and the rise of student activism in and around Beijing University. He revisits reform in pedagogical and learning routines, changes in daily campus life, the fluid relationship between the city and its residents, and the actions of allegedly cultural student organizations. Through a careful analysis of everyday life and urban space, Lanza radically reconceptualizes the emergence of political subjectivities (categories such as “worker,” “activist,” and “student”) and how they anchor and inform political action. His research underscores how, during a time of crisis, the lived realities of university and student became unsettled in Beijing, and how political militancy in China arose only when the boundaries of identification were challenged.]
—–. “Of Chronology, Failure, and Fidelity: When Did the May Fourth Movement End?” Twentieth-Century China 38, 1 (Jan. 2013): 53-70.
[Abstract: The essay posits the question of the end of May Fourth as a properly political sequence. If we consider May Fourth as a political movement, asking how it ends implies asking what kind of political subjects and political organizations were active then and ceased to be active at a certain point in time. Asking when and how the May Fourth movement ended implies, therefore, asking what ended. The essay analyzes a series of statements and actions signaling the “end” or the “defeat” of May Fourth in order to question whether there were collective practices, locations, and categories proper to the May Fourth period and how they got exhausted. Two elements appear to be crucial: the organizational structure of the xuehui and the category of “student.”]
Larson, Wendy. “Women and Revolution in May Fourth Culture.” In Findeison and Gassmann, eds., Autumn Floods: Essays in Honour of Marian Galik. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997.
—–. “Psychology and Freudian Sexual Theory in Early 20th Century China.” In Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009, 31-76.
Lao, Chao-Chih. “Humor versus Huaji.” The Journal of Language and Linguistics 2, 1 (2003): 25-46.
Laughlin, Charles. 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 Charles 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 Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity 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.]
—–. “1922, December 2: New Culture and the Pedagogy of Writing.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 289-95.
Lee, Haiyan. “All the Feelings That Are Fit to Print: The Community of Sentiment and the Literary Public Sphere in China, 1900-1918.” Modern China 27, 3 (July 2001): 291-327.
—–. “Sympathy, Hypocrisy, and the Trauma of Chineseness.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, 2 (Fall 2004): 76-122.
—–. “Tears That Crumbled the Great Wall: The Archaeology of Feeling in the May Fourth Folklore Movement.” The Journal of Asian Studies 64, 1 (Feb. 2005): 35-65. [Deals chiefly with Gu Jiegang’s study of the Meng Jiang Nu legend and briefly with Guo Moruo’s translation of ancient poetry] [download from AAS website]
—–. “Governmentality and the Aesthetic State: A Chinese Fantasia.” positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no.1 (2006): 99-130 [deals with Zhang Jingsheng’s Mei de rensheng guan (Philosophy of a beautiful life), Meide shehui zuzhi fa (How to organize a beautiful society), and, to a lesser extent, Xingshi (Sex histories)].
—–. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. [MCLC Resource Center review by Charles Laughlin]
—–. “The Other Chinese: Romancing the Folk in May Fourth Native Soil Fiction.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 33, 2 (Sept. 2007).
[Abstract: Etienne Balibar has argued that no nation possesses a natural ethnic basis. And yet the “people” tends to be the most taken-for-granted entity in nationalist thought and literature. I argue in this paper that the “people” is a fictive category invented in the contested field of literary production in the early 20th century. In particular, I examine the concept of the “folk” in the works of such native soil writers as Yang Zhensheng, Fei Ming, and Shen Congwen. By contrasting the image of the folk in native soil fiction with the more familiar image of the peasants in realist fiction, I call attention to the paradoxical status of the people in the nationalist imagination. If the peasants were ignorant, unfeeling, and parochial under the pen of Lu Xun, the folk were revealed to have preserved a deep reservoir of emotions and humanity beneath the stultifying trappings of Confucianism in native soil fiction. I aim to show that representations of the folk and the native soil were intimately bound up with the production of the modern individual as an affective moral agent and of the nation as a community of sympathy.]
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973. [download pdf copy of the entire book from Ohio State University Libraries Knowledge Bank]
—–. “The Romantic Temper in May Fourth Writers.” In Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973, 69-84.
—–. “Modernity and Its Discontents: The Cultural Agenda of the May Fourth Movement.” In Kenneth Lieberthal et al., eds., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991, 158-177.
—–. “The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Investigations.” In Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 31-61.
—–. “Incomplete Modernity: Rethinking the May Fourth Intellectual Project.” In Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001, 31-65.
—–. “May Fourth: Some Fin de Siecle Reflections.” Harvard Asia Quarterly (Summer 1999).
Lee, Mabel. “May Fourth: Symbol of the Spirit of Bring-It-Here-ism for Chinese Intellectuals.” Papers on Far Eastern History 41 (March 1990): 77-96.
Lei, Jun. Master of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China 1890s-1930s. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: The crisis of masculinity surfaced and converged with the crisis of the nation in the late Qing, after the doors of China were forced open by Opium Wars. The power of physical aggression increasingly overshadowed literary attainments and became a new imperative of male honor in the late Qing and early Republican China. Afflicted with anxiety and indignation about their increasingly effeminate image as perceived by Western colonial powers, Chinese intellectuals strategically distanced themselves from the old literati and reassessed their positions vis-à-vis violence. In Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s–1930s, Jun Lei explores the formation and evolution of modern Chinese intellectual masculinities as constituted in racial, gender, and class discourses mediated by the West and Japan. This book brings to light a new area of interest in the “Man Question” within gender studies in which women have typically been the focus. To fully reveal the evolving masculine models of a “scholar-warrior,” this book employs an innovative methodology that combines theoretical vigor, archival research, and analysis of literary texts and visuals. Situating the changing inter- and intra-gender relations in modern Chinese history and Chinese literary and cultural modernism, the book engages critically with male subjectivity in relation to other pivtal issues such as semi-coloniality, psychoanalysis, modern love, feminism, and urbanization.]
Li, Hsiao-t’i. Opera, Society, and Politics: Chinese Intellectuals and Popular Culture, 1901-1937. Ph. D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1996.
Li, Tonglu. “The May Fourth Intellectuals and Religion.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds.. New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2025, 147-71.
Lin, Carlos Yu-kai. “The Universality of the Concept of Modern Literature: Wang Guowei, Zhou Zuoren, and Other May Fourth Writers’ Conception of Wenxue.” Dongya guannian shi jikan 東亞觀念史集刊 8 (June 2015): 343-400.
[Abstract: Wenxue is the modern Chinese term for literature. However, it is an ancient term that originated from the Confucian classics where it did not bear the same meaning as it does now. While some scholars have pointed out that wenxue was reintroduced as the modern Chinese term for “literature” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what qualifies this term to serve as the modern referent for “literature” is a question that remains underexplored. In this paper, I analyze the works of Wang Guowei ( 王國維 , 1877-1927), Hu Shi ( 胡適 , 1891-1962), Chen Duxiu ( 陳獨秀 , 1879-1942), Liu Bannong ( 劉半農 , 1891-1934), Luo Jia Lun ( 羅家倫 , 1897-1969), and Zhou Zuoren ( 周作人 , 1885-1967), among others, to show how wenxue articulates of set of cosmopolitan values such as the idea of individual life and the call for a reflection on the humanity as a whole.]
—–. “A Historical and Bilingual Perspective on the Concetp of Vernacular.” In Carlos Yu-Kai Lin and Victor H. Mair, eds., Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and Its Legacy. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 283-300.
—–. “May Fourth in Hong Kong.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds.. New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2025, 233-56.
Lin, Carlos Yu-kai and Victor Mair, eds. Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and Its Centennial Legacy. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
[Abstract: Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and its Centennial Legacy is a collective work of thirteen scholars who reflect on the question of how to remember the May Fourth Movement, one of the most iconic socio-political events in the history of modern China. The book discusses a wide range of issues concerning the relations between politics and memory, between writing and ritualizing, between fiction and reality, and between theory and practice. Remembering May Fourth thus calls into question the ways in which the movement is remembered, while at the same time calling for the need to create new memories of the movement.]
—–. New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2025.
[Abstract: Why did the “Shandong Question” vanish in the May Fourth narrative? How did conservatives and traditionalists endure admist the progressive wave of the new culture movement? What role did Confucian ritualism and religion play in shaping May Fourth literature? Is an uncanny connection hidden between “Return Qingdao” and “Liberate Hong Kong”? This volume, edited by Carlos Yu-Kai Lin and Victor H. Mair, and with contributors from across the fields of intellectual history, literature and languages, philosophy, and Asian studies, answers these questions and offers new insights into the May Fourth movement. It explores this pivotal historical event both as a singular occurrence and as a sustaining cultural-intellectual campaign. The new volume is brimming with fresh perspectives, uncovering these enigmas, and unveiling the nuanced and intricate world of the May Fourth to its discening readers.]
Lin, Shaoyang. “Making National History with Literary History: Hegel’s Influence via Taine on Meiji Japan and the Late Qing and Early Republican China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 2 (2015): 160-89.
[Abstract: The essay sheds lights on the process of the making of national history with literary history in modern Japan and its influences on modern China. It argues that the simultaneous establishment of modern Japanese historiography and the writing of literary history in Japan had a direct impact on the establishment of Chinese historiography in the late Qing, and the writing of Chinese literary history in twentieth-century China. It will focus more on the philosophical ideas of Taine and Hegel and their influence in Japanese literary historiography and, due to the limited length of this paper, only by extension, that of China as well. The primary focus of this paper is the interaction of the modern Japanese and Chinese pursuit of new historical narratives in the construction of new national and cultural identities in the context of global modernity. It also stresses that, an invisible “origin,” the writing of Chinese (literary) history in the early twentieth-century, ironically, directly and indirectly, has been internalized by the writing of Japanese national history in an exclusive framework of nation-building.]
Lin, Yu-sheng. “Radical Iconoclasm in the May Fourth Period and the Future of Liberalism.” In Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973, 23-58.
—–. The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Anti-traditionalism in the May Fourth Era. Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1979.
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, Jianhui. “The Role of Japan in the Formation of Modern Chinese Culture.” Nichibunken Newsletter 56 (Nov. 2004).
Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity, 1900-1937. Stanford: SUP, 1995.
—–. “A Folksong Immortal and Official Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century China.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 553-609. [deals in part with May Fourth folklore movement]
Liu, Lydia, ed. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Liu, Siyuan. Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
[Abstract: n 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 ofkabuki 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.]
Liu, Tao Tao. “Perceptions of City and Country in Modern Chinese Fiction in the Early Republican Era.” In Liu and David Faure, eds., Town and Country in China: Identity and Perception. London: Palgrave, 2002, 203-32.
Long, Hoyt, Anatoly Detwyler, and Yuancheng Zhu. “Self-Repetition and East Asian Literary Modernity, 1900-1930.” Cultural Analytics (May 21, 2018).
Lu, Ping. “Beyond Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science: The Introduction of Miss Moral and the Trend of Moral Retribution in the New Culture Movement.” Frontiers of History in China 2, 2 (2007): 254-86.
Luo, Di. Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945. Leiden: Brill, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Frederik H. Green]
Luo, Zhitian. Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society. Trs. Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. Leiden: Brill, 2017. [MCLC Resource Center review by Theodore D. Huters]
[Abstract: In Shifts of Power, Luo brings together nine essays to explore the causes and consequences of various shifts of power in modern Chinese society, including the shift from scholars to intellectuals, from the traditional state to the modern state, and from the people to society. Adopting a microhistorical approach, Luo situates these shifts at the intersection of social change and intellectual evolution in the midst of modern China’s culture wars with the West. Those culture wars produced new problems for China, but also provided some new intellectual resources as Chinese scholars and intellectuals grappled with the collisions and convergences of old and new in late Qing and early Republican China.]
Liu, Zaifu. “The Failure of the May Fourth Movement and My Two Struggles.” Prism 17, 1 (March 2020): 127-42.
[Abstract: In this speech, Liu Zaifu thoroughly discusses the history of the May Fourth movement and the New Culture movement in the whole last century and the circumstances of humanity in China. In his explanation, May Fourth could be conceptualized through three different groups of concepts: the cultural May Fourth and the political May Fourth, the New Culture movement and the New Literature movement, and the masculine May Fourth and the feminine May Fourth. Liu regards the May Fourth spirit as a complete failure, in terms of six symbolic signs: (1) the mass spiritual suicide of Guo Moruo and the Creation Society, (2) the failure of humanity, (3) the elimination of individuality and personality, (4) the reversal of the enlightenment subject, (5) the devastation of the world vision, and (6) the failure of aesthetic practice. Liu also shares his two struggles. The first struggle in the 1980s was to reconstruct the subjectivity and dignity of people. After going abroad, he started the second struggle in exiling the gods, by which he endeavored to free himself from the four major spiritual chains: revolutionary thinking, the idolatry of nation, all the political ideologies, and dualistic thinking.]
Ma, Yuxin. “Women Journalists in the Chinese Enlightenment, 1915-1923.” Gender Issues 22, 1 (Dec. 2005): 56-84.
—–. “Male Feminism and Women’s Subjectivities: Zhang Xichen, Chen Xuezhao, and the New Woman.” Twentieth-Century China 29, no.1 (Nov 2003) 1-37.
Manfredi, Paul. “Great Expectations: Self, Form, and the First Modern Chinese Poem.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 2 (Fall 2001): 1-29.
Mangalagiri, Adhira. “Slave of the Colonizer: The Indian Policeman in Colonial Chinese Literature.” In Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui, eds., Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840-1960s. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021, 29-66.
[Abstract: This chapter reads Chinese poetry, short stories, and novels (1900-1930) that engage the much-despised figure of the Indian policeman stationed by the British in China’s semicolonial treaty ports. Grappling with the challenge of apprehending this Indian figure – who held the unique capacity to frustrate entrenched binaries of colonized and colonizer, brother and enemy, self and other – the Chinese texts articulate an antagonism at once founded upon intimacy and yet in expression of conflict. The texts engage in an exercise of thinking China and India together outside the tenets of pan-Asianist solidarity, extending a form of relation born out of repulsion. Although it erodes friendly ties, this mode of China-India thought proves generative, reshaping debates on literary language, national autonomy, and revolution underway in late-Qing and early-Republican China, and telling the story of modern Chinese literature’s development anew from the perspective of this unlikely Indian interlocuter.]
Mao, Chen. Between Tradition and Change: The Hermeneutics of May Fourth Literature. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997.
Mao, Peijie. Popular Magazines and Fiction in Shanghai, 1914–1925: Modernity, the Cultural Imaginary, and the Middle Society. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021.
[Abstract: This book explores the rise of Shanghai-based popular magazines produced by the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School” in early twentieth-century China. It examines the national, gender, family, and social imaginaries constructed and negotiated through a complex network of relationships between popular writers, magazine editors, and their intended readers, which were represented in various forms of popular narratives, including patriotic stories, war/military stories, family narratives, domestic fiction, utopian writings, and industrial-business stories. The author argues that the national imagination, social ideals, and the notions of ideal womanhood and the new family, were intrinsically linked and integral to the search for cultural identity of the emerging Chinese “middle society” and an expression of their collective sensibilities, experiences, and aspirations. This book suggests that the cultural imaginaries configurated in these magazine stories articulated a shared quest for modernity, one that emphasized sentiment, quotidian experience, the pursuit of the modern family and individual success, strengthening of the nation, and the reinvention of cultural tradition. Popular magazines and fiction, therefore, became uniquely instrumental in catalyzing the process of Chinese modernity, which emerged and developed along the symbiotic interrelations between the private and the public, the traditional and the modern, and the real and the imaginary.]
—–. “‘Loving Nation’ and ‘Subjugated Nation’: Popular Narratives of the Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai.” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 4, 2 (2018): 221-236
[Abstract: This article examines the nationalist discourse in Shanghai popular print media during the late Qing and the early Republican period, focusing on the literary representation and imagination of ‘loving nation’ (aiguo) and ‘subjugated nation’ (wangguo) in popular fiction. It discusses the popular nationalism through ‘patriotic stories’ (aiguo xiaoshuo), a fiction genre promoted by Shanghai popular media in the 1910s, which, on the one hand, responded to the external plights of the newly established Republic of China, while on the other shaped the popular imagination of a new national identity and modern nation state. I argue that ‘patriotic stories’ contributed to this national imaginary through a discovery of sentimentality, female emotionality and an increasing fancy of the ‘other’, while simultaneously producing the competing narratives of romantic love and patriotic feelings, and private and public realms. This sentimental narrative was also inextricably interwoven with the narratives of trauma and humiliation, and an imagination of wangguo in popular fiction. Viewing patriotism as a cultural production constructed through memory, imagination and reinterpretation, I suggest that the popular imagination of nation generated a hybrid and uniquely powerful mode of nationalistic narrative, one conjoining sentimentalism, patriotism and commercial interests in early twentieth-century China.]
Masini, Federico. The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution Toward a National Language: The Period from 1840-1898. The Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series no. 6. Berkeley, 1993.
McConaghy, Mark. “Printing the Voice of the People: Folksong Weekly and the Heterogeneity of Chinese Folk Culture.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 1 (Spring 2020): 138-193.
McDougall, Bonnie. “The Impact of Western Literary Trends.” In Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977, 37-62.
—–. “Disappearing Women and Disappearing Men in May Fourth Narrative: A Post-Feminist Survey of Short Stories by Mao Dun, Bing Xin, Ling Shuhua and Shen Congwen.” In McDougall, Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century. HK: Chinese University Press, 2003, 133-70.
Mei Sheng, ed. Zhongguo funu wenti taolun ji (Collection of discussion on the Chinese women’s question). 6 vols. Shanghai: Xin wenhua, 1934 (originally published in 1923).
Meisner, Maurice. “Cultural Iconoclasm, Nationalism, and Internationalism in the May Fourth Movement.” In Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973, 14-22.
Mullaney, Thomas S. “Quote Unquote Language Reform: New-Style Punctuation and the Horizontalization of Chinese.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, 2 (Fall 2017): 206-250
Murthy, Viren. “The Politics of Fengjian in Late Qing and Early Republican China.” In Kai-wing Chow, Tze-ki Hon and Hung-yok Ip eds., Modernities as Local Practices, Nationalism, and Cultural Production: Deconstructing the May-Fourth Paradigm on Modern China. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008.
Ng, Janet. The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography of the Early Twentieth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. [with treatment of autobiographies by Chen Hengzhe, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Xie Bingying, Eileen Chang, Yu Dafu, and Shen Congwen]
Ni, Ruiqin. “Tolstoy and the May Fourth Literature.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 223-33.
Odgen, Suzanne P. “The Sage in the Inkpot: Bertrand Russell and Chna’s Social Reconstruction in the 1920s.” Modern Asian Studies 16, 4 (1982): 529-600.
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.
Peng, Hsiao-yen. Modern Chinese Counter Enlightenment: Affect, Reason, and the Transcultural Lexicon. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Peng Hsiao-yen argues that a trend of CounterEnlightenment had grown from the late Qing to the May Fourth era in the 1910s to the 1920s and continued to the 1940s. She demonstrates how Counter-Enlightenment was manifested with case studies such as Lu Xun’s writings in the late 1900s, the Aesthetic Education movement from the 1910s to 1920s, and the Science and Lifeview debate in the 1920s. During the period, the life philosophy movement, highlighting the epistemic debate on affect and reason, is connected with its counterparts in Germany, France, and Japan. The movement had widespread and long-term impact on Chinese philosophy and literature. Using the transcultural lexicon as methodology, this book traces how the German term Lebensanschauung (lifeview), a key concept in Rudolf Eucken’s life philosophy, constituted a global tide of Counter-Enlightenment that influenced the thought of leading Chinese intellectuals in the Republican era. Peng contends that Chinese intellectuals’ transcultural connections with others in the philosophical pursuit of knowledge triggered China’s self-transformation. She has successfully reconstructed the missing link in the Chinese theater of the worldwide dialectic of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.]
Pusey, James Reeve. China and Charles Darwin. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1983.
Rahav, Shakhar. “Theory and Practics in the May Fourth Period.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds. Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and Its Centennial Legacy. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 137-56.
Rawski, Evelyn S. “The Social Agenda of May Fourth.” In K. Lieberthal et al., eds., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991, 139-57.
Rea, Christopher. The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by David Moser]
Russell, Bertrand. The Problem of China. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966 (originally published 1922).
Saari, Hon L. Legacies of Childhood: Growing Up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890-1920. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1990.
Sakamoto, Hiroko. “The Cult of ‘Love and Eugenics’ in May Fourth Movement Discourse.” positions: east asia cultures critique 12, 2 (Fall 2004): 329-376.
Schaeffer, Ingo. “Remarks on the Question of Individuality and Subjectivity in the Literature of the May Fourth Period.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 21-43.
Schwarcz, Vera. “Ibsen’s Nora: The Promise and the Trap.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (Jan-Mar. 1975).
—–. “Remapping May Fourth: Between Nationalism and Enlightenment.” Republican China 12, 1 (Nov. 1986): 20-35.
—–. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Schwartz, Benjamin, ed. Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. Cambridge: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1973. [essays by C. Furth, M. Goldman, Grieder, L. Lee, Yu-sheng Lin, and Meisner]
—–. “Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After.” In Merle Goldman an Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds., An Intellectual History of Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 97-141.
Shen, Samson C. “Tagore and China.” In the Footsteps of Xuanzang: Tan Yun-shan and India. Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1999.
Song, Mingwei. “The Bildungsroman of New Youth: May Fourth and the Modern Novel.” In Song, Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015, 113-149.
—–. “1916, September 1: Inventing Youth in Modern China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 148-53.
Sun, Lung-kee. “The Presence of the Fin-de-siecle in the May Fourth Era.” In Gail Hershatter, et.al., eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain. Stanford: SUP, 1996, 194-209.
Takeuchi, Yoshimi. What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi. Tr. Richard Calichman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. [among others, has essays on Lu Xun and Hu Shi]
Tam, Kwok-kan. “Iconoclasm as Ibsenism: Ibsen in the May Fourth Era.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 119-28.
—–. “Ibsenism and Ideological Constructions of the ‘New Woman’ in Modern Chinese Fiction.” In Peng-hisang Chen and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Amsterdam,: Rodopi, 2002, 179-86.
—–. “Ibsenism and the Modern Chinese Self.” Monumenta Serica 54 (2006): 287-98.
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, with Michel Hockx. “The Creation Society (1921-1930).” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 103-36.
Teow, See Heng. Japanese Cultural Policy toward China, 1918-1931: A Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999.
Teruo, Tarumoto. “A Statistical Survey of Translated Fiction, 1840-1920.” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdan, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1998, 37-42.
Tsai, Chien-hsin. “Literary Bombs: A Sketch of the May Fourth Generation and Bomb as Metaphor.” In Carlos Yu-Kai Lin and Victor H. Mair, eds., Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and Its Legacy. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 227-46.
Tsai, Tiffany Yun-Chu. “Cannibalism as Pathology: China’s Modernity in Crisis.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds.. New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2025, 191-215.
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.
Tsu, Jing. Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of a Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2005.
[Abstract: How often do we think of cultural humiliation and failure as strengths? Against prevailing views on what it means to enjoy power as individuals, cultures, or nations, this provocative book looks at the making of cultural and national identities in modern China as building success on failure. It reveals the exercise of sovereign power where we least expect it and shows how this is crucial to our understanding of a modern world of conflict, violence, passionate suffering, and cultural difference. ]
Tu, Wei-ming. “Iconoclasm, Holistic Vision, and Patient Watchfulness: a Personal Reflection on the Modern Chinese Intellectual Quest.” Daedalus 116, 2 (1987): 75-94.
Veg, Sebastian. Fictions du pouvoir chinois: Littérature, modernisme et démocratie au début du XXe siècle. Paris: Editions EHESS, 2009.
—–. “Democratic Modernism: Rethinking the Politics of Early Twentieth-Century Fiction in China and Europe.” boundary 2 38, 3 (2011): 27-65.
Vinci, Renata. “The advent of duanpian xiaoshuo: a combination of western discourse and Chinese legacy in the early definitions of the modern short story.” Rivista degli studi orientali XCIII, 4 (2020): 135-149.
Vogel, Ezra. “The Unlikely Heroes: The Social Role of the May Fourth Writers.” In Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977, 145-60.
Wagner, Rudolf. “The Canonization of May Fourth.” In Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001, 66-121.
Wang, Bo. Inventing a Discourse of Resistance: Rhetorical Women in Early Twentieth-Century China. Phd diss. Tempe: University of Arizona, 1995.
Wang, C.T. The Youth Movement in China. New York: New Republic, 1927.
Wang, Edward Q. Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.
Wang, Fan-sen. Fu Ssu-nien: A Life in Chinese History and Politics. NY: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Wang, Hui 汪晖. “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China: The Concept of Science and Its Application in Modern Chinese Thought.” positions 3, 1 (1995): 1-68.
—–. Wu di panghuang: Wusi ji qi huisheng 无地彷徨: 五四及其回声 (No room for wandering: May Fourth and its echoes). Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi, 1994.
—–. “The Liberation of the Object and the Interrogation of Modernity: Rethinking The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought.” Modern China 34, 1 (2008).
—–. “How to Explain ‘China” and Its ‘Modernity’: Rethinking The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought.” Tr. Wang Yang. In Wang Hui, The Politics of Imagining Asia. Ed. Theodore Huters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 63-94. Previously published as “The Liberation of the Object and the Interrogation of Modernity: Rethinking the Rise of Modern China.” Modern China 4, 1 (Jan. 2008): 114-40.
—–. “The Transformation of Culture and Politics: War, Revolution, and the ‘Thought Warfare’ of the 1910s.” Twentieth-Century China 38, 1 (Jan. 2013): 5-33.
[Abstract: During the May Fourth Culture Movement, Chen Duxiu from New Youth and Du Yaquan of Eastern Miscellany engaged in a series of heated exchanges in their common search for a solution to the Republican crisis and an understanding of World War I. Du argued that nation-states are founded on the cultural and civilizational orientation of its people, therefore the essence of war and the source of political conflict are functions of the thoughts of the people. This insight shifted the debate from the political to the cultural arena, and allowed the May Fourth intellectuals to examine the attributes of Eastern and Western civilizations as a way to counter the threats of Hongxian monarchism, China’s political and social fragmentation, as well as the inadequacies of Western nation-statehood. Du predicted that the future master of the twentieth century would be a scientific laborer with a cultural outlook derived from the mediation of the traditional Chinese and twentieth-century European civilizations.]
Wang, Qin. Configurations of the Individual in Modern Chinese Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 57-114.
[Abstract: This book aims to demonstrate the multiplicity of configurations of the individual in modern Chinese literature through analyzing several classic texts written by Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun, Lao She, and Mu Shiying. It attempts to refresh our understanding of the history of modern Chinese literature and indirectly responds to the controversial issue of “individual rights” (or “human rights”) in present-day China, showing that in modern Chinese literature, various configurations of the individual imply political possibilities that are not only irreconcilable with each other, but irreducible to the determination of the modern discourse of “individualism” introduced by the West. A groundbreaking work, it will give valuable context to political scientists and other scholars seeking to understand what “China” means in the 21st century.]
“Weber and the Question of Chinese Modernity.” Tr. Theodore Huters. In Wang Hui, The Politics of Imagining Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 264-305.
Wei, Yan. Detecting Chinese Modernities: Rupture and Continuity in Chinese Detective Fiction, 1896-1949. Leiden: Brill, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jeffrey Kinkley]
[Abstract: Yan Wei historicizes the two stages in the development of Chinese detective fiction and discusses the rupture and continuity in the cultural transactions, mediation, and appropriation that occurred when the genre of detective fiction traveled to China during the first half of the twentieth century. Wei identifies two divergent, or even opposite strategies for appropriating Western detective fiction during the late Qing and the Republican periods. She further argues that these two periods in the domestication of detective fiction were also connected by shared emotions. Both periods expressed ambivalent and sometimes contradictory views regarding Chinese tradition and Western modernity.]
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, Xiaoming. “A Journal and a ‘Society’: On the ‘May Fourth’ Literary Tradition.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, 2 (Fall 1999): 1-39.
Wang, Xiaoping. “The Problematic of ‘High (-Brow) Literature’ and ‘Low (-Brow) Literature’: Some Thoughts on the Origins of Modern Chinese Literature.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 1 (2013): 117-41.
[Abstract: This paper discusses the criteria according to which literature is categorized as “high (-brow) literature” or “low (-brow) literature” in modern China. It suggests that these standards change over time and are intimately tied to the problematics of canonization, legitimization, and cultural hegemony. In modern China, the criteria are also closely related to class differentiation. Furthermore, it contends that, in the Chinese academic world, there is often a tendency to interpret certain forms of middle-brow literature as belletristic literature that breaks though the boundary between “high (-brow) literature” and “low (-brow) literature.” In discussing “middle-brow” literature in modern China, this paper takes “Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly” literature as the object of its analysis and proposes that middle-brow literature is essentially the moralization of political and social issues, which serves to displace social-economic and political concerns. This is usually accomplished through the glorification of conservative ethical-moral viewpoints.]
Wang, Young-tsu. “The Intricate Mentality of May Fourth.” Modern Asian Studies 10, 2 (April 1976).
Weng, Jeffrey. “What Is Mandarin? The Social Project of Language Standardization in Early Republican China.” Journal of Asian Studies 77, 3 (2018): 611-33.
[Abstract: Scholars who study language often see standard or official languages as oppressive, helping the socially advantaged to entrench themselves as elites. This article questions this view by examining the Chinese case, in which early twentieth-century language reformers attempted to remake their society’s language situation to further national integration. Classical Chinese, accessible only to a privileged few, was sidelined in favor of Mandarin, a national standard newly created for the many. This article argues that Mandarin’s creation reflected an entirely new vision of society. It draws on archival sources on the design and promulgation of Mandarin from the 1910s to the 1930s to discuss how the way the language was standardized reflected the nature of the imagined future society it was meant to serve. Language reform thus represented a radical rethinking of how society should be organized: linguistic modernity was to be a national modernity, in which all the nation’s people would have access to the new official language, and thus increased opportunities for advancement.]
Weston, Timothy. “The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community, 1913-1917.” Modern China 24, 3 (1998): 255-84.
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.
—–. “Inflecting Gender: Zhan Kai/Siqi Zhai’s “New Novels” and Courtesan Sketches.” Nan Nu: Men, Women, and Gender in China 6, 1 (2004).
Witke, Roxanne. Transformation of Attitudes towards Women during the May Fourth Era of Modern China. Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, 1970.
Wong, Linda Pui-ling. “The Initial Reception of Oscar Wilde in Modern China: With Special Reference to Salome.” Comparative Literature and Culture 3 (Sept. 1998): 52-73.
Wong, Wang-chi. “An Act of Violence: Translation of Western Fiction in the late Qing and early Republican Period.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 21-39.
Wu, Shengqing. “Contested Fengya: Classical-Style Poetry Clubs in Early Republican China.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies of 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.]
—–. Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture. NY: Columbia University Press, 2020.
[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.]
Wusi yundong huiyilu 五四运动回忆录 (Memoirs of the May Fourth movement). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.
Xu, Jilin . “Historical Memories of May Fourth: Patriotism, But of What Kind?” Tr. Duncan Campgell. China Heritage Quarterly 17 (March 2009).
—–. “May Fourth: A Patriotic Movement of Cosmopolitanism.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 9, 1 (April 2009): 29-61.
Xu, Xiaoqun. Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Individualism in Modern China: The Chenbao Fukan and the New Culture Era, 1918-1928. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014.
[Abstract: analyzes important aspects of Chinese intellectual life and cultural practices that formed and informed the historical phenomenon known as the New Culture era. Through examining an influential newspaper supplement published in Beijing during 1918–1928, along with other contemporary sources, the book explores the full dimensions and rich textures of the intellectual-literary discourses of the time period and contributes to a re-consideration and re-appreciation of the New Culture phenomenon in modern China. It highlights a key intellectual-moral paradox in Chinese discourses between cosmopolitanism as an idealistic aspiration and nationalism as a practical imperative, both in complex relationship to individualism, a paradox that ultimately speaks to the constant negotiations between Chinese tradition and Western culture in the making of Chinese modernity. These issues have remained vitally relevant to China and the world nearly a century later.]
Xu, Xueqing. “The Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 47-78.
Yan, Jiayan. “The Origin, Features, and Evaluation of the May Fourth New Vernacular.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 2, 4 (Dec. 2008): 599-616.
Yang, Shu. “Wrestling with Tradition: Early Chinese Suffragettes and the Modern Remodeling of the Shrew Trope.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 34, 1 (Summer 2022): 128-169.
Ye, Michelle Jia. “Exhibiting Knowledge, Extending Network: Translation Bricolage Columns of the Magazines of the China Book Company, 1913–1916.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 2 (Fall 2020): 277-322.
Ye, Ziming. “Humanism and the May Fourth New Literature.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 201-11.
Yeh, Catherine Vance. “Root Literature of the 1980s as a Double Burden.” In Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001, 229-56.
Yeh, Michelle. “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.
Yeh, Wen-hsin. “Middle County Radicals: The May Fourth Movement in Zhejiang.” The China Quarterly 140 (Dec. 1994): 903-925.
Yin, Zhiguang. Politics of Art: The Creation Society and the Practice of Theoretical Struggle in Revolutionary China. Leiden: Brill, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Liang Luo]
[Abstract: In Politics of Art Zhiguang Yin investigates members of the Creation Society and their social network while in Japan. The study contextualises the Chinese left-wing intellectual movements and their political engagements in relation with the early 20th century international political events and trends in both East Asia and Europe. The Creation Society was largely viewed as a subject of literary studies. This research, however, evaluates these intellectuals in the context of Chinese revolution and elaborates their theoretical contribution to the Chinese Communist Party’s practice of “theoretical struggle” as a main driving force of ideological construction. As this study tries to demonstrate, theoretical struggle drives the ideological politics forward while maintaining its political vigour.]
Yu, Ying-shih. “Neither Renaissance nor Engligtenment: A Historian’s Reflections on the May Fourth Movement.” In Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001, 299-324.
Yuan, Jin. “The Origin of the Westernized Vernacular Chinese Baihuawen: A Re-evaluation of the Influence of Western Missionaries on Chinese Literature.” Tr. Wang Keyou. Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 3, 2 (2009): 247–269.
Yue, Ming-bao. “Am I That Name?: Women’s Writing as Cultural Translation in Early 1920’s China.” Comparative Criticism 22 (Fall 2000): 63-89.
Zhang, Jingyuan. Psychoanalysis in China: Literary Transformations, 1919-1949. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 1992.
Zhang, Yu. Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915-1965. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2020, 17-43.
Zhao, Xuduo. “Democracy and the Rise of Socialism in May Fourth China.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds.. New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2025, 216-32.
Zhong, Yurou. Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916-1958. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Shuheng (Diana) Zhang]
Zhou, Gang. Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jon Eugene von Kowallis]
[Abstract: This is the first book to concentrate not only on the triumph of the vernacular in modern China but also on the critical role of the rise of the vernacular in world literature, invoking parallel cases from countries throughout Europe and Asia. Contents: Introduction; The Language of Utopia; The Chinese Renaissance; The Shaky House; ‘The Vernacular Only’ Writing Mode; Epilogue]
—–. “Chinese Renaissance, Other Renaissances.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds. Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and Its Centennial Legacy. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 95-112.
—–. “Multiple Vernacularizations.” In
Zhu, Ping. Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Literature and Culture. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Yi Zheng]
[Abstract: offers an in-depth study on how late Qing and modern Chinese intellectuals used gender as a discursive battlefield to demand power vis-à-vis colonial discourses. Through a combination of cultural analysis and literary analysis, including discussions of modern Chinese writers such as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Zhang Ziping, Guo Moruo, Mu Shiying, Liu Na’ou, Bai Wei, and Ding Ling, Ping Zhu shows the resilience and malleability of Chinese modernity via a femininity imagined an empowered and empowering. By focusing on ‘the feminine at large,’ this book draws a contrasting image of the docile, contained feminine in colonial gender ideology to provide one salient example of China’s politics of resistance.]
—–. “Becoming Laborers: The Identification with Labor during the Chinese New Culture Movement.” Journal of Asian Studies 82, 1 (2023): 25-43.
[Abstract: This article shows that the construction of the notion of dignified laborer during the Chinese New Culture Movement (1915–24) was not simply a reversal of preexisting social hierarchy that placed the mental laborers above the manual laborers but rather a complex and profound process of identity formation that created dynamic equalization between the national and the global, mental laborers and manual laborers, as well as men and women. Through reading a series of cultural and literary works, this article shows that the dignified laborer was an inclusive modern identity that gained traction during the New Culture Movement, when the Chinese intellectuals sought ways to foster national solidarity, realize the full potential of humanity, facilitate intersubjective understanding, and mend social divisions. As a result, this was a period when Chinese people from all walks vied to become laborers with dignity, amidst a rising democratic culture of reciprocal equal recognition.]
—–. “Reenchanting History.” In Carlos Yu-kai Lin and Victor Mair, eds.. New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2025, 172-90.
Zhu, Yun. Imagining Sisterhood in Modern Chinese Texts, 1890-1937. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017.
[Abstract: This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”]
Zou, John. “Travel and Translation: An Aspect of China’s Cultural Modernity, 1862-1926.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998, 133-51.
Post-May Fourth (1920s-1930s)
Ai, Xiaoming. “Polemics on Literature and Art in Soviet Russia During the 1920s and Debate on Revolutionary Literature in China.” Tr. Deng Shiwu. Social Sciences in China 10, 1 (Mar 1989):141-157.
Anderson, Marsten. The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Bevan, Paul. Intoxicating Shanghai–An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age. Leiden, Brill, 2020.
[Abstract: In Intoxicating Shanghai Paul Bevan explores the work of a number of Chinese modernist figures in the fields of literature and the visual arts, with an emphasis on the literary group the New-sensationists and its equivalents in the Shanghai art world, examining the work of these figures as it appeared in pictorial magazines. It undertakes a detailed examination into the significance of the pictorial magazine as a medium for the dissemination of literature and art during the 1930s. The research locates the work of these artists and writers within the context of wider literary and art production in Shanghai, focusing on art, literature, cinema, music, and dancehall culture, with a specific emphasis on 1934 – ‘The Year of the Magazine’.]
Biasco, Margherita. “The Crisis of the Family System and the Search for a New Identity of Chinese Youth.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 189-200.
Blumberg-Kason, Susan. Bernadine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China. Brentwood, TN: Post Hill Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Bernardine Szold Fritz arrived in Shanghai in 1929 to marry her fourth husband. Only thirty-three years old, she found herself in a time and place like no other. Political intrigue and scandal lurked on every street corner. Art Deco cinemas showed the latest Hollywood flicks, while dancehall owners and jazz musicians turned Shanghai into Asia’s top nightlife destination. Yet from the night of their wedding, Bernardine’s new husband did not live up to his promises. Instead of feeling sorry for herself or leaving Shanghai, Bernardine decided to make a place for herself. Like other Jewish women before her, she started a salon in her home, drawing famous names from the world of politics, the arts, and the intelligentsia. She introduced Emily Hahn, the charismatic opium-smoking writer for The New Yorker, to the flamboyant hotelier Sir Victor Sassoon and legendary poet Sinmay Zau. And when Hollywood stars Anna May Wong, Charlie Chaplin, and Claudette Colbert passed through Shanghai, Bernardine organized gatherings to introduce them to their Shanghai contemporaries. When Bernardine’s salon could not accommodate all who wanted to attend, she founded the International Arts Theater to produce avant-garde plays, ballets, lectures, and visual arts exhibits, often pushing audiences beyond their comfort zones. As civil war brewed and World War II soon followed, Bernardine’s devotion to the arts and the people of Shanghai brought joy to the city just before it would change forever.]
Button, Peter. Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity. Leiden: Brill, 2009. [MCLC Resource Center Publications review by Thomas Moran]
[Abstract: The emergence of the Chinese socialist realist novel can best be understoodin light of the half-century long formation of the modern concept ofliterature in China. Globalized in the wake of modern capitalism, literary modernity configures the literary text in a relationship to both modern philosophy and literary theory. This book traces China’s unique, complex, and creative articulation of literary modernity beginning with Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q.” Cai Yi’s aesthetic theory of the type (dianxing) and the image (xingxiang) is then explored in relation to global currents in literary thought and philosophy, making possible a fundamental rethinking of Chinese socialist realist novels like Yang Mo’s Song of Youth and Luo Guangbin and Yan Yiyan’s Red Crag.]
Chan, Adrian. “Towards a Marxist Theory and Sociology of Literature in China, to 1933.” In Gungwu Wang, ed., Society and the Writer: Essays on Literature in Modern Asia. Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, 1981, 155-72.
Chan, Sylvia. “Realism or Socialist Realism?: The ‘Proletarian’ Episode in Modern Chinese Literature.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 9 (Jan. 1983): 55-74.
Chang, Shuei-May, ed. Casting Off the Shackles of Family: Ibsen’s Nora Figure in Modern Chinese Literature, 1918-1942. Peter Lang, 2002.
Chen, Jianhua. “Canon Formation and Linguistic Turn: Literary Debates in Republican China, 1919-1949.” In Kai-Wing Chow, Tze-ki Hon, Hung-yok Ip, and Don C. Price, eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search for Chinese Modernity. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008, 51-67.
—–. “The Northern Expedition and Revolution Plus Love Fiction.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Rosemary Roberts, and Yang Ling, eds. Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009, 163-78.
—–. “Revolution: From Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature.” In Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 15-32.
Chen, Pingyuan. “1924, May 30: Enchantment with the Voice.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 301-5.
Chen, Xiaomei. “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.
Chu, Samuel. “The New Life Movement, 1934-37.” In John Lane, ed., Researches in the Social Sciences on China. NY: 1957, 1-17.
Chun, Tarryn. “Revolutionary Illumination: Stage Lighting, Politics, and Play in 1930s Shanghai Theater.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30, 2 (Fall 2018): 87-140.
Clark, Katerina. Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Liteary Commons, 1919-1943. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Xiaolu Ma]
[The present project proposes a new form of “intellectual journey. This would be a journey in which historical knowledge is produced and conveyed by visual materials integrated into an architecture of relational data.2 Our exploration of this approach in the fields of history and China studies has a major purpose: opening the way to comparable applications in all the social sciences. This project will take up the challenge of elaborating a new form of historical writing. The objective is not simply to combine texts and documents but to make these different elements “speak” separately, in parallel and/or together. To achieve these goals, the participants in this project will follow a parallel route on the basis of three distinct corpuses of still pictures (photographs) and moving pictures (films) centered on three groups of individuals (“common people”, “peasant-boatmen”, “actors, actresses and new women” in three different spaces at the same period (the 1920s and the 1930s)]
Daruvala, Susan. Zhou Zuoren and an alternative Chinese Response to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000.
—–. “Yuefeng: A Literary Journal of the 1930s.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 339-78. Originally published in a different version as “Yuefeng: A Literary Journal of the 1930s.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, 2 (Fall 2006): 39-97.
Denton, Kirk A. “Introduction.” In Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996, 1-61.
Dirlik, Arif. “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution.” Journal of Asian Studies 34, 4 (Aug. 1975): 945-80.
Dooling, Amy D. Feminism and Narrative Strategies in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Women’s Writing. Ph.D. Diss. NY: Columbia University, 1998.
—–. Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. [contains the following chapters: (1) National imaginaries : feminist fantasies at the turn of the century; (2) The new woman’s women; (3) Love and/or revolution? : fictions of the feminine self in the 1930s cultural left; (4) Outwitting patriarchy : comic narrative strategies in the works of Yang Jiang, Su Qing, and Zhang Ailing; (5) A world still to win]
Farquhar, Mary. “Revolutionary Children’s Literature.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 4 (July 1980): 61-84.
Ferry, Megan. Chinese Women Writers of the 1930s and Their Critical Reception. Ph.d diss. St. Louis: Washington University, 1998.
Findeisen, Raoul David. “From Literature to Love: Glory and Decline of the Love-Letter Genre.” In Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 79-112.
Fogel, Joshua A. “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, 2 (1989): 575-602.
Fried, Daniel. “A Bloody Absence: Communist Narratology and the Literature of May Thirtieth.”Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews 26 (2004): 23-53.
Furth, Charlotte. “Cultural Politics in Modern Chinese Conservatism.” In Furth, ed., The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976, 22-53.
Furth, Charlotte, ed. The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.
Galik, Marian. “Goethe in China (1932).” Asian and African Studies (Bratislava) 14 (1978): 11-25.
—–. “Between the Garden of Gethsemane and Golgotha: The Last Night and Day of Jesus in Modern Chinese Literaturre (1921-1942).” Tamkang Review 31, 4-32,1 (Summer-Autumn 2001): 99-116.
Gao, Hua. How the Red Sun Rose: The Origin and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945. Translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2017.
[Abstract: This work offers the most comprehensive account of the origin and consequences of the Yan’an Rectification Movement from 1942 to 1945. The author argues that this campaign emancipated the Chinese Communist Party from Soviet-influenced dogmatism and unified the Party, preparing it for the final victory against the Nationalist Party in 1949. More importantly, this monograph shows in great detail how Mao Zedong established his leadership through this party-wide political movement by means of aggressive intra-party purges, thought control, coercive cadre examinations, and total reorganizations of the Party’s upper structure. The result of this movement not only set up the foundation for Mao’s new China, but also deeply influenced the Chinese political structure today. The Chinese version of How the Red Sun Rose was published in 2000, and has had nineteen printings since then.]
Gao, Jie. Saving the Nation through Culture: The Folklore Movement in Republican China. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019.
[Abstract: The Modern Chinese Folklore Movement burst onto the scene at National Peking University between 1918 and 1926. A group of literary scholars, inspired by Western thought, turned to the study and revitalization of folklore – popular songs, beliefs, and customs – to rally the people around the flag during an era of deep postwar disillusionment. Saving the Nation through Culture opens a new chapter in the world history of the folklore movement by exploring the origins and evolution of the discipline’s Chinese branch. Gao reveals that intellectuals in the New Culture Movement influenced the founding folklorists with their aim to repudiate Confucianism following the Chinese Republic’s failure to modernize the nation. The folklorists, however, faced a unique challenge – advocating for modern academic methods and constructions while upholding folklore as the key to the nation’s salvation.]
Ge, Baoquan. “The Influence of Russian Classical Literature on Modern Chinese Literature Before and After the May Fourth Movement.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 213-22.
Goldman, Merle. “Left-Wing Criticism of the Pai-Hua Movement.” In Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1973, 85-94.
Gruner, Fritz. “Some Remarks on the Cultural-political Significance of the Chinese League of Left-wing Writers at the Beginning of the 1930’s.” In A.R. Davis, ed., Search for Identity: Modern Literature and the Creative Arts in Asia: papers presented to the 28 International Congress of Orientalists. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1975, 255-259.
Ho, Dahpon. “Night Thoughts of a Hungry Ghost Writer: Chen Bulei and the Life of Service in Republican China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, 1 (Spring 2007): 1-59.
Hockx, Michel. “In Defense of the Censor: Literary Autonomy and State Authority in Shanghai, 1930-1936.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 2, 1 (July 1998): 1-30.
—–. Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911-1937. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003. [MCLC Resource Center review by Edward M. Gunn]
—–. “Gentility in a Shanghai Literary Salon in the 1930s.” In Berg, Daria and Starr, Chloe, eds., The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations Beyond Gender and Class. Routledge, 2007, 58-72.
—–. “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, T. A. The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China. Seattle: U. of Washingtion P, 1968.
—–. “Ch’u Ch’iu-po: The Making and Destruction of a Tenderhearted Communist.” In Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968, 3-54.
—–. “Lu Hsun and the Dissolution of the League of Leftist Writers.” In Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968, 101-63.
—–. “Enigma of the Five Martyrs.” In Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968, 163-233.
—–. “Twenty Years after the Yenan Forum.” In Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968, 234-60.
Hsueh, Daphne. “Why Nora? Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in China and Its Early Imitation.” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 16, 3 (1981): 1-18
Huang, Nicole. “War, Revolution, and Urban Transformation: Chinese Literature of the Republican Era, 1920s-1940s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 54-66.
Hunter, Neale. The League of Left-Wing Writers, Shanghai, 1930-1936. Ph.d. diss. Canberra: Australian National University, 1973.
—–. “Another look at the League of Left-Wing Writers.” In A.R. Davis, ed., Search for identity: modern literature and the creative arts in Asia: papers presented to the 28 International Congress of Orientalists. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1975, 260-270.
Huters, Theodore. “Between Praxis and Essence: The Search for Cultural Expression in the Chinese Revolution.” In Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner eds., Marxism and the Chinese Experience. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989, 316-37.
Imbach, Jessica. “Ghost Talk in 1936: ‘Living Ghosts’ and ‘Real Ghosts’ in Republican-Era Literary Discourse and the Two Analects Fortnightly Ghost-Story Special Issues.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 12, 1 (2014): 14-45.
—–. “Variations on Gui and the Trouble with Ghosts in Modern Chinese Fiction.” Asia 70, 3 (2016: 865-80.
Ip, Hung-yok. Intellectuals in Revolutionary China, 1921-1949: Leaders, Heroes and Sophisticates. NY: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005.
[Abstract: This book originally examines how prominent communist intellectuals in China during the revolutionary period (1921 to 1940) constructed and presented identities for themselves and how they narrated their place in the revolution. Table of Contents. Part 1: Introduction 1. Perspectives;l Part 2: Leaders: Self-Construction from the Functional Perspective 2. Radical Intellectuals as the Guiding Force of Change: The Beginning of the Political Odyssey 3. Manufacturing Political Leadership I: The Yaqian Intellectuals and Peng Pai 4. Manufacturing Political Leadership II: Mao Zedong Part 3: Heroes: Self-Construction from the Emotional Perspective 5. Narrating Politicized Subjectivity 6. The Nobility of Ambivalence and Devotion Part 4: Sophisticates: Self-Construction from the Aesthetic Perspective 7. Clinging to Refinement in the Revolution Part 5: Epilogue 8. Self-Construction, Politics and Culture: Some General Reflections 9. Conclusion.]
Iwasaki, Clara. Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions across the Pacific. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Kyle Shernuk]
Jin, Siyan. La metamorphose des image poetiques des symbolistes francais aux symbolistes chinois, 1915-1937. Dortmund: Projekt Verlag, 1996.
Jones, Andrew F. Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
[Abstract: In 1992 Deng Xiaoping famously declared, “Development is the only hard imperative.” What ensued was the transformation of China from a socialist state to a capitalist market economy. The spirit of development has since become the prevailing creed of the People’s Republic, helping to bring about unprecedented modern prosperity, but also creating new forms of poverty, staggering social upheaval, physical dislocation, and environmental destruction. In Developmental Fairy Tales, Andrew F. Jones asserts that the groundwork for this recent transformation was laid in the late nineteenth century, with the translation of the evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, and Spencer into Chinese letters. He traces the ways that the evolutionary narrative itself evolved into a form of vernacular knowledge which dissolved the boundaries between beast and man and reframed childhood development as a recapitulation of civilizational ascent, through which a beleaguered China might struggle for existence and claim a place in the modern world-system. This narrative left an indelible imprint on China’s literature and popular media, from children’s primers to print culture, from fairy tales to filmmaking. Jones’s analysis offers an innovative and interdisciplinary angle of vision on China’s cultural evolution. He focuses especially on China’s foremost modern writer and public intellectual, Lu Xun, in whose work the fierce contradictions of his generation’s developmentalist aspirations became the stuff of pedagogical parable. Developmental Fairy Tales revises our understanding of literature’s role in the making of modern China by revising our understanding of developmentalism’s role in modern Chinese literature.]
Kane, Anthony J. The League of Left Wing Writers and Chinese Literary Policy. Ph.D. diss. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1982.
Keaveney, Christopher T. “Uchiyama Kanzô’s Shanghai Bookstore and Its Impact on May Fourth Writers.” E-ASPAC 1 (2001).
—–. “Literary Interventions: Yamamoto Sanehiko’s Contributions to Sino-Japanese Literary Exchange in the Interwar Period.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22, 2 (Fall 2010): 196-230.
Kindler, Benjamin. “Labor Romanticism against Modernity: The Creation Society as Socialist Avant-Garde.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 2 (Fall 2020), 43-99.
—–. “The Music of the Machine: A Ying, International Constructivism, and Sonic Modernity in Chinese.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 34, 1 (Summer 2022): 170-201.
Knight, Sabina. “Social Fiction: Must Context Entail Determinism?” In Knight, The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006, 104-30.
Kuo, Ya-pei. Debating Culture in Interwar China. NY: Routledge, 2010.
[Abstract: The May Fourth era (1915-1927) is considered a pivotal point in the history of modern China. This period is usually portrayed as a “Chinese Enlightenment,” a period during which total change from the past was sought through the appropriation of Western science and democracy. Conventional narratives concentrate on the dominant intellectual current of the period, the New Culture Movement, as the inspiration for social reform and political revolution. This book challenges that revolution-centered narrative of May Fourth history by showing how the propositions of New Culture were questioned and revised after the initial radical phase. Through a focus on the post-1919 debates on culture, identity, and history, this book argues that Chinese intellectuals reformulated their visions of modernity through critiques of both Occidentalism and totalistic iconoclasm. Importantly, it also argues that the global post-WWI ambivalence towards the idea of Progress in Western civilization impacted significantly on the development of the May Fourth era in its latter stage.]
Kuzuoğlu, Uluğ. “The Chinese Latin Alphabet: A Revolutionary Script in the Global Information Age.” Journal of Asian Studies 81, 1 (2022): 1-19.
[Abstract: This article rethinks the history of Chinese script reforms and proposes a new genealogy for the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), invented in 1931 by Chinese and Russian revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. Situating script reforms within a global information age that emerged out of the nineteenth-century communications revolution, the article historicizes the CLA within a technologically and ideologically contrived Sino-Soviet space. In particular, it shows the intimate links between the CLA and the Unified New Turkic Alphabet (UNTA), which grew out of a latinization movement based in Baku, Azerbaijan. The primary purpose of the UNTA was to latinize the Arabic script of the Turkic people living in Soviet Central Asia, but it was immediately exported to the non-Turkic world as well in an effort to latinize languages across Eurasia and ignite revolutionary internationalism. This article investigates the forgotten figures involved in carrying the Latin alphabet from Baku to Shanghai and offers a new framework to scrutinize the history of language, scripts, and knowledge production across Eurasia.]
—–. “Basic Chinese: Cognitive Management, Communication Engineering, and Mass Literacy in China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 34, 1 (Summer 2022): 1-31.
Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Shanghai Manhua, the Neo-Sensationist School of Literature, and Scenes of Urban Life.” MCLC Resource Center (Sept. 2010).
Lao, Chao-Chih. “Humor versus Huaji.” The Journal of Language and Linguistics 2, 1 (2003): 25-46.
Larson, Wendy. “The End of ‘Funu wenxue’: Women’s Literature from 1925 to 1935.” Modern Chinese Literature 4, 1/2 (1988): 39-54. Also in Tani Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, 58-73.
—–. “Psychology and Freudian Sexual Theory in Early 20th Century China.” In Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009, 31-76.
Laughlin, Charles A. Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
—–. “The Debate on Revolutionary Literature.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 401-404. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 159-62.
—–. “The Analects Group and the Genre of Xiaopin.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 207-40.
—–. 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 Charles 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 Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity 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.]
Laurence, Patricia. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China. Columbia: U of South Carolina Press, 2003.
—–. “Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes.” The Kingsman. [King’s College Cambridge University] (Fall 2003).
Lean, Eugenia. “The Making of a Public: Emotions and Media Sensation in 1930s China.” Twentieth-Century China 29, 2 (April 2004): 39-62.
Lee, Haiyan. “Governmentality and the Aesthetic State: A Chinese Fantasia.” positions: eastasia cultures critique 14, no.1 (2006): 99-130 [deals with Zhang Jingsheng’s Mei de rensheng guan (The Philosophy of a Beautiful Life), Meide shehui zuzhi fa (How to Organize a Beautiful Society), and, to a lesser extent, Xingshi (Sex histories)].
—–. “From Abroad, with Love: Transnational Texts, Local Critiques.” Tamkang Review 36, 4 (Summer 2006): 189-225. [deals with the Chinese translations and reception of Love and Duty by S. Horose, The Education of Love by Edmondo de Amicis, and “Three Generations” by Alexandra Kollontai]
—–. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. [MCLC Resource Center review by Charles Laughlin]
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973. [download pdf copy of the entire book from Ohio State University Libraries Knowledge Bank]
—–. “Shanghai Modern: Reflections on Urban Culture in China in the 1930s.” Public Culture 11, 1 (1999).
—–. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
—–. “The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Explorations.” In Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 31-61.
Lei, Jun. Master of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China 1890s-1930s. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: The crisis of masculinity surfaced and converged with the crisis of the nation in the late Qing, after the doors of China were forced open by Opium Wars. The power of physical aggression increasingly overshadowed literary attainments and became a new imperative of male honor in the late Qing and early Republican China. Afflicted with anxiety and indignation about their increasingly effeminate image as perceived by Western colonial powers, Chinese intellectuals strategically distanced themselves from the old literati and reassessed their positions vis-à-vis violence. In Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s–1930s, Jun Lei explores the formation and evolution of modern Chinese intellectual masculinities as constituted in racial, gender, and class discourses mediated by the West and Japan. This book brings to light a new area of interest in the “Man Question” within gender studies in which women have typically been the focus. To fully reveal the evolving masculine models of a “scholar-warrior,” this book employs an innovative methodology that combines theoretical vigor, archival research, and analysis of literary texts and visuals. Situating the changing inter- and intra-gender relations in modern Chinese history and Chinese literary and cultural modernism, the book engages critically with male subjectivity in relation to other pivtal issues such as semi-coloniality, psychoanalysis, modern love, feminism, and urbanization.]
Li, Li. “Female Bodies as Imaginary Signifiers in Chinese Revolutionary Literature.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Rosemary Roberts, and Yang Ling, eds. Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009, 93-118.
Liu, Jianmei. “Shanghai Variations on ‘Revolution Plus Love.'” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14, 1 (Spring 2002): 51-92. [deals with texts by Shi Zhecun, Liu Na’ou, Mu Shiying, Zhang Ziping, and Ye Lingfeng]
—–. Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women’s Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003.
Liu, Ping. “The Left-Wing Drama Movement and Its Relationship to Japan.” Tr. Krista van Fleit. positions: east asia cultures critique 14, 2 (2006): 449-66.
Luo, Di. Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945. Leiden: Brill, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Frederik H. Green]
Ma, Iris. “Imagining Female Heroism: Three Tales of the Female Knight-Errant in Republican China.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (e-journal) 31: 183–204.
[Abstract: Invented largely for urban audiences and widely circulated across multiple media, the image of the female knight-errant attracted unprecedented attention among writers, readers, publishers, and officials in the first half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on three best-selling martial arts tales published in Republican China (1912–1949), paying particular attention to their martial heroines. It also explores what granted the female knight-errant character such enduring popularity and how the writers—Xiang Kairan, Gu Mingdao, and Wang Dulu—garnered the interest of their readers. As the author points out, martial arts novelists drew on a long and rich genre repertoire formulated before 1911 while taking into consideration contemporary debates regarding gender, thereby maintaining the female knight-errant figure as a relevant and compelling construct. More importantly, the author argues, through portraying their martial heroines in relation to family, courtship, and female subjectivity, martial arts novelists resisted the prevailing discourse on Chinese womanhood of their times while imagining female heroism.]
Macdonald, Sean. “‘Modernism’ in Modern Chinese Literature: The ‘Third Type of Person’ as a Figure of Autonomy.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (June-Sept. 2002).
McDougall, Bonnie. “Dominance and Disappearance in Modern Chinese Narrative, 1928-1935.” In Findeison and Gassmann, eds., Autumn Floods: Essays in Honour of Marian Galik. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997.
Miller, Mark. “The Yusi Society.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 171-206.
Mullaney, Thomas S. “Quote Unquote Language Reform: New-Style Punctuation and the Horizontalization of Chinese.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, 2 (Fall 2017): 206-250
Neder, Christina. “Censorship in Republican China.” In Derek Jones, ed., Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999.
Peng, Hsiao-yen. Dandyism and Transcultural Modernity: The Dandy, the Flaneur, and the Translator in 1930s Shanghai, Tokyo, and Paris. NY: Routledge, 2010.
[Abstract: This book views the Neo-Sensation mode of writing as a traveling genre, or style, that originated in France, moved on to Japan, and then to China. The author contends that modernity is possible only on “the transcultural site”—transcultural in the sense of breaking the divide between past and present, elite and popular, national and regional, male and female, literary and non-literary, inside and outside. To illustrate the concept of transcultural modernity, three icons are highlighted on the transcultural site: the dandy, the flaneur, and the translator. Mere flaneurs and flaneurses simply float with the tide of heterogeneous information on the transcultural site, whereas the dandy/flaneur and the cultural translator, propellers of modernity, manage to bring about transformative creation. Their performance marks the essence of transcultural modernity: the self-consciousness of working on the threshold, always testing the limits of boundaries and tempted to go beyond them. To develop the concept of dandyism—the quintessence of transcultural modernity—the Neo-Sensation gender triad formed by the dandy, the modern girl, and the modern boy is laid out. Writers discussed include Liu Na’ou, a Shanghai dandy par excellence from Taiwan, Paul Morand, who looked upon Coco Chanel the female dandy as his perfect other self, and Yokomitsu Riichi, who developed the theory of Neo-Sensation from Kant’s the-thing-in-itself.]
—–. “A Traveling Text: Souvenirs entomologiques, Japanese Anarchism, and Shanghai Neo-Sensationism.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 268-302.
Pino, Angel. “Haipai et Jingpai: une querelle litteraire dans les annees trente.” In Isabelle Rabut and Angel Pino, eds. Pekin — Shanghai: Tradition et modernite dans la litterature chinoise des annees trente. Paris: Editions Bleu de Chine, 2000, 61-90.
Rabut, Isabelle. “Ecole de Pekin, ecole de Shanghai: un parcours critique.” In Isabelle Rabut and Angel Pino, eds. Pekin — Shanghai: Tradition et modernite dans la litterature chinoise des annees trente. Paris: Editions Bleu de Chine, 2000, 13-60.
—–. “L’esthetique du jingpai.” In Isabelle Rabut and Angel Pino, eds. Pekin — Shanghai: Tradition et modernite dans la litterature chinoise des annees trente. Paris: Editions Bleu de Chine, 2000, 93-122.
Rabut, Isabelle and Angel Pino, eds. Pekin — Shanghai: Tradition et modernite dans la litterature chinoise des annees trente. Paris: Editions Bleu de Chine, 2000.
Rea, Christopher G. “Comedy and Cultural Entrepreneurship in Xu Zhuodai’s Huaji Shanghai.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, 2 (Fall 2008): 40-91.
—–. The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by David Moser]
Riep, Steven L. “Chinese Modernism: The New Sensationists.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 418-24. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 176-82.
Rosenmeier, Christopher John. Shanghai Avant-garde: The Fiction of Shi Zhecun, Mu Shiying, Xu Xu, and Wumingshi. Ph. D. diss. London: University of London, 2006.
Smith, Norman. “‘I Am an Ordinary Woman’: Yang Xu and the Articulation of Chinese Ideals of Womanhood in Japanese Occupied Manchuria.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 8, 3 (2002): 35-54.
[Yang Xu’s (1918- ) second volume of collected works, My Diary (Wo de riji; 1944), articulates the key themes that prevailed in Chinese women’s literature in the Japanese colonial state of Manzhouguo. In Manzhouguo, literature was a vital domain for the negotiation of Chinese cultural identities in a Japanese colonial context. This paper seeks to reveal how Yang Xu, like other contemporary Chinese women writers in Manzhouguo, was driven by the May Fourth ideals of women’s emancipation that dominated social discourse in the Republic of China during the 1920s to defy the conservative cultural aspirations of the Japanese colonial regime.]
Sohigian, Diran John . “Contagion of Laughter: The Rise of the Humor Phenomenon in Shanghai in the 1930s.” positions: east asia cultures critique 15, 1 (Spring 2007): 137-63. [Project Muse link]
—–. “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, Mingwei. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015.
[Abstract: The rise of youth is among the most dramatic stories of modern China. Since the last years of the Qing dynasty, youth has been made a new agent of history in Chinese intellectuals’ visions of national rejuvenation through such tremendously popular notions as “young China” and “new youth.” The characterization of a young protagonist with a developmental story has also shaped the modern Chinese novel. Young China takes youth as a central literary motif that was profoundly related to the ideas of nationhood and modernity in twentieth-century China. A synthesis of narrative theory and cultural history, it combines historical investigations of the origin and development of the modern Chinese youth discourse with close analyses of the novelistic construction of the Chinese Bildungsroman, which depicts the psychological growth of youth with a symbolic allusion to national rejuvenation. Negotiating between self and society, ideal and action, and form and reality, such a narrative manifests as well as complicates the various political and cultural symbolisms invested in youth through different periods of modern Chinese history. In this story of young China, the restless, elusive, and protean image of youth both perpetuates and problematizes the ideals of national rejuvenation.]
Spakowski, Nicola. “Dreaming a Future for China: Visions of Socialism among Chinese Intellectuals in the Early 1930s.” Modern China 45, 1 (Jan. 2019).
[Abstract: The article examines Chinese leftist intellectuals’ visions of China’s future as they were published in a special issue of Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany) in 1933. It places their texts in the international tradition of socialism and in particular the tensions between Marxism and “utopian socialism.” Two variants of socialism can be identified in the Chinese texts: “Datong socialism,” the moral vision of a society of freedom and equality, and Soviet socialism, the vision of an industrialized society with features and institutions as in the Soviet Union. Supporters of both variants identified with the “masses,” but remained elitist in that they spoke on behalf of these masses and claimed an intellectual niche in the proletarian society of the future.]
Tam, Kwok-kan. “Ibsenism and Ideological Constructions of the ‘New Woman’ in Modern Chinese Fiction.” In Peng-hisang Chen and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Amsterdam,: Rodopi, 2002, 179-86.
Tong, Q. S. “1930, October: Practical Criticism in China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 360-65.
Tsu, Jing. Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of a Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Tyerman, Edward. Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
[Abstract: Following the failure of communist revolutions in Europe, in the 1920s the Soviet Union turned its attention to fostering anticolonial uprisings in Asia. China, divided politically between rival military factions and dominated economically by imperial powers, emerged as the Comintern’s prime target. At the same time, a host of prominent figures in Soviet literature, film, and theater traveled to China, met with Chinese students in Moscow, and placed contemporary China on the new Soviet stage. They sought to reimagine the relationship with China in the terms of socialist internationalism—and, in the process, determine how internationalism was supposed to look and feel in practice. Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet cultural imagination. Tyerman tracks how China became the key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of socialist internationalism should be mediated, represented, and produced. The central figure in this story, the avant-garde writer Sergei Tret’iakov, journeyed to Beijing in the 1920s and experimented with innovative documentary forms in an attempt to foster a new sense of connection between Chinese and Soviet citizens. Reading across genres and media from reportage and biography to ballet and documentary film, Tyerman shows how Soviet culture sought an aesthetics that could foster a sense of internationalist community. He reveals both the aspirations and the limitations of this project, illuminating a crucial chapter in Sino-Russian relations. Grounded in extensive sources in Russian and Chinese, this cultural history bridges Slavic and East Asian studies and offers new insight into the transnational dynamics that shaped socialist aesthetics and politics in both countries.]
Volland, Nicolai. “In Search of the City of Light: Chinese Creative Communities and the Myth of Interwar Paris.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, 1 (Spring 2019): 192-228.
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 Lu Yin.]
Wang, Qin. Configurations of the Individual in Modern Chinese Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 57-114.
[Abstract: This book aims to demonstrate the multiplicity of configurations of the individual in modern Chinese literature through analyzing several classic texts written by Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun, Lao She, and Mu Shiying. It attempts to refresh our understanding of the history of modern Chinese literature and indirectly responds to the controversial issue of “individual rights” (or “human rights”) in present-day China, showing that in modern Chinese literature, various configurations of the individual imply political possibilities that are not only irreconcilable with each other, but irreducible to the determination of the modern discourse of “individualism” introduced by the West. A groundbreaking work, it will give valuable context to political scientists and other scholars seeking to understand what “China” means in the 21st century.]
Wang, Ye. “Narrative Genre and Logical Form of the Revolutionary Novels of the 1920s.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Rosemary Roberts, and Yang Ling, eds. Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009, 179- 97.
Wei, Yan. Detecting Chinese Modernities: Rupture and Continuity in Chinese Detective Fiction, 1896-1949. Leiden: Brill, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jeffrey Kinkley]
[Abstract: Yan Wei historicizes the two stages in the development of Chinese detective fiction and discusses the rupture and continuity in the cultural transactions, mediation, and appropriation that occurred when the genre of detective fiction traveled to China during the first half of the twentieth century. Wei identifies two divergent, or even opposite strategies for appropriating Western detective fiction during the late Qing and the Republican periods. She further argues that these two periods in the domestication of detective fiction were also connected by shared emotions. Both periods expressed ambivalent and sometimes contradictory views regarding Chinese tradition and Western modernity.]
Wen, Yuan-ning and others. Imperfect Understanding: Intimate Portraits of Modern Chinese Celebrities. Ed. by Christopher Rea. Amherst: Cambria, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Li Guo]
Wong, Wang-chi. Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930-1936. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.
—–. “1931, February 7: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 371-76.
Wu, Shengqing. 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.]
—–. “The Kiss as an Art of Love: Touch, Sensuality, and Embodied Experience in Modern Chinese Culture.” In Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang, eds., Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. London: Routledge, 2022, 99-127.
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.
Y.P.S. “Five Years of Chinese Magazine Literature.” China Today 1, 6 (March 1935): 113-15.
Yang, Lianfen. “Women and Revolution in the Context of the 1927 Nationalist Revolution and Literature.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Rosemary Roberts, and Yang Ling, eds. Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009, 119-39.
Yin, Zhiguang. Politics of Art: The Creation Society and the Practice of Theoretical Struggle in Revolutionary China. Leiden: Brill, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Liang Luo]
[Abstract: In Politics of Art Zhiguang Yin investigates members of the Creation Society and their social network while in Japan. The study contextualises the Chinese left-wing intellectual movements and their political engagements in relation with the early 20th century international political events and trends in both East Asia and Europe. The Creation Society was largely viewed as a subject of literary studies. This research, however, evaluates these intellectuals in the context of Chinese revolution and elaborates their theoretical contribution to the Chinese Communist Party’s practice of “theoretical struggle” as a main driving force of ideological construction. As this study tries to demonstrate, theoretical struggle drives the ideological politics forward while maintaining its political vigour.]
Zanella, William Mark. China’s Quest for a Modern Culture: The 1935 Debate on Cultural Construction. Ph.d. diss. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1985.
Zhang, Hong. “Eros and Politics in Revolutionary Literature.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Rosemary Roberts, and Yang Ling, eds. Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009, 3-26.
Zhang, Jingyuan. Psychoanalysis in China: Literary Transformations, 1919-1949. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 1992.
Zhang, Yinde. “The Shanghai School: Westernised Urbanity and Scriptural Mimesis.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 247-67.
Zhang, Yingjin. The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.
—–. “The Texture of the Metropolis: Modernist Inscriptions of Shanghai in the 1930s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999, 173-88. First published in Modern Chinese Literature 9, 1 (Spring 1995): 11-30.
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.
Zhang, Yu. Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915-1965. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2020, 44-76.
Zhong, Yurou. Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916-1958. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Shuheng (Diana) Zhang]
Zhou, Xiaoyi. “Beardsley, the Chinese Decadents and Commodity Culture in Shanghai During the 1930s.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 32/33 (2000/2001): 117-34.
Zhu, Ping. Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Literature and Culture. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Yi Zheng]
[Abstract: offers an in-depth study on how late Qing and modern Chinese intellectuals used gender as a discursive battlefield to demand power vis-à-vis colonial discourses. Through a combination of cultural analysis and literary analysis, including discussions of modern Chinese writers such as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Zhang Ziping, Guo Moruo, Mu Shiying, Liu Na’ou, Bai Wei, and Ding Ling, Ping Zhu shows the resilience and malleability of Chinese modernity via a femininity imagined an empowered and empowering. By focusing on ‘the feminine at large,’ this book draws a contrasting image of the docile, contained feminine in colonial gender ideology to provide one salient example of China’s politics of resistance.].
Zhu, Yun. Imagining Sisterhood in Modern Chinese Texts, 1890-1937. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017.
[Abstract: This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”]
Literature of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) and Postwar (1945-49)
Allen, Joseph. “1948, October; 2014, February: The Life of a Chinese Literature Textbook.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 539-44.
Apter, David, and Tony Saich. Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Barr, Alan. “From ‘Thoughts on March 8’ to ‘Gap’ and ‘The Sufferings of Liping’: Mate Choice and Marriage in the Work of Three Yan’an Authors.” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 25, 1 (2023): 103-151.
[Abstract: During China’s war with Japan from 1937 to 1945, the Communist-controlled border regions in north China saw an influx of progressive, patriotic youth from other parts of the country, bringing these new arrivals into contact with officials and army officers in the Communist power structure. Marriage was one potential outcome of such interactions, but while offering certain advantages it was often seen as problematic, with questions raised about the motives and methods of the parties involved. Given its sensitive nature, the subject of mate choice could only briefly be explored in literary works before an ideological clampdown was imposed in the late spring and summer of 1942. This article examines the key works that addressed the issue at the time and details the criticisms that followed their publication. It begins with a close reading of the relevant passage in “Sanbajie you gan” (Thoughts on March 8), the famous essay by Ding Ling 丁玲 (1904-86), and goes on to consider two stories by younger Yan’an authors, Ma Jia 马加 (1910-2004) and Mo Ye 莫耶 (1918-86), who broached the topics of mate choice and marriage shortly before and after Ding Ling wrote her essay. Together these works, published during the relatively liberal period leading up to the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, reveal some critical fault lines within the revolutionary coalition. To this article is appended a full translation of Mo Ye’s story “Liping de fannao” (The sufferings of Liping), which vividly depicts a young woman’s struggle to reconcile her choice of marriage partner with her self-image as a progressive woman.]
Benton, Gregor. “The Yenan Opposition.” New Left Review 92 (Aug. 1975): 93-106.
Bong, InYoung. “A ‘White Race’ without Supremacy: Russians, Racial Hybridity, and Liminality in the Chinese Literature of Manchukuo.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 26, 1 (Spring 2014): 141-92
Cheek, Timothy. “The Fading of Wild Lilies: Wang Shiwei and Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks in the First CCP Rectification Movement.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 11 (1984): 25-58.
Chen, Jianhua. “Canon Formation and Linguistic Turn: Literary Debates in Republican China, 1919-1949.” In Kai-Wing Chow, Tze-ki Hon, Hung-yok Ip, and Don C. Price, eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search for Chinese Modernity. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008, 51-67.
Chen, Minjie. The Sino- Japanese War and Youth Literature: Friends and Foes on the Battlefield. London: Routledge, 2016.
[Abstract: The Sino-Japanese War (1937 – 1945) was fought in the Asia-Pacific theatre between Imperial Japan and China, with the United States as the latter’s major military ally. An important line of investigation remains, questioning how the history of this war has been passed on to post-war generations’ consciousness, and how information sources, particularly those exposed to young people in their formative years, shape their knowledge and bias of the conflict as well as World War II more generally. This book is the first to focus on how the Sino-Japanese War has been represented in non-English and English sources for children and young adults. As a cross-cultural study and an interdisciplinary endeavour, it not only examines youth-orientated publications in China and the United States, but also draws upon popular culture, novelists’ memoirs, and family oral narratives to make comparisons between fiction and history, Chinese and American sources, and published materials and private memories of the war. Through quantitative narrative analysis, literary and visual analysis, and socio-political critique, it shows the dominant pattern of war stories, traces chronological changes over the seven decades from 1937 to 2007, and teases out the ways in which the history of the Sino-Japanese War has been constructed, censored, and utilized to serve shifting agendas. Providing a much needed examination of public memory, literary representation, and popular imagination of the Sino-Japanese War, this book will have huge interdisciplinary appeal, particularly for students and scholars of Asian history, literature, society and education.]
Chen, Xiaomei. “Worker-Peasant-Soldier Literature.” In Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 65-83.
Chen, Yue. “Multiethnicity and Multilingualism in the Minor Literature of Manchukuo.” positions: asia critique 28, 2 (May 2020): 341-62.
Chung, Hilary and Tommy McClellan. “The ‘Command Enjoyment’ of Literature in China: Conferences, Controls and Excesses.” In Chung, ed. In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Critical Studies no. 6. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, 1-23. [deals with the Yan’an Forum and the 1979 Fourth Congress of Chinese Writers and Artist and compares them to similar conferences in the Soviet Union]
Chung, Wen. “National Defense Literature and Its Representative Works.” Chinese Literature 10 (Oct. 1971): 91-99.
Clark, Katerina. Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Liteary Commons, 1919-1943. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Xiaolu Ma]
Culver, Annika A. and Norman Smith, eds. Manchukuo Perspectives: Transnational Approaches to Literary Production. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Pei-Yin Lin]
Daruvala, Susan. “1946, July 15: On Literature and Collaboration.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 522-27.
DeMare, Brian James. 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.]
Denton, Kirk A. “Introduction.” In Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996, 1-61.
—–. “Literature and Politics: Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature.'” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 463-69. Rpt. in Denton, ed, Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 224-30.
—–. “Rectification: Party Discipline, Intellectual Remolding, and the Formation of a Political Community.” In Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 51-63.
Dooling, Amy. Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. [contains the following chapters: (1) National imaginaries : feminist fantasies at the turn of the century; (2) The new woman’s women; (3) Love and/or revolution? : fictions of the feminine self in the 1930s cultural left; (4) Outwitting patriarchy : comic narrative strategies in the works of Yang Jiang, Su Qing, and Zhang Ailing; (5) A world still to win]
Feng, Jin. The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2003.
FitzGerald, Carolyn. Fragmenting Modernisms: Chinese Wartime Literature, Art, and Film, 1937-49. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
[Abstract: FitzGerald traces the evolution of Chinese modernism during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-45) and Chinese Civil War (1945-49) through a series of close readings of works of fiction, poetry, film, and visual art, produced in various locations throughout wartime China. Showing that the culture of this period was characterized by a high degree of formal looseness, she argues that such aesthetic fluidity was created in response to historical conditions of violence and widespread displacement. Moreover, she illustrates how the innovative formal experiments of uprooted writers and artists expanded the geographic and aesthetic boundaries of Chinese modernism far beyond the coastal cities of Shanghai and Beijing. TOC: Introduction Out of the Ashes: Towards a Wartime Aesthetics of Dissolution; Chapter 1: A Sonnet in an Air-Raid Shelter: Mu Dan and the New Lyricism; Chapter 2: Intersections between Cartoon and National Art: Ye Qianyu’s Search for the Sinicized Cartoon; Chapter 3: Wang Zenqi’s Collection of Chance Encounters: The Shifting Essence of the Wartime Short Story; Chapter 4: Between Forgetting and the Repetitions of Memory: Fei Mu’s Aesthetics of Desolation in Spring in a Small Town; Chapter 5: Fei Ming’s After Mr. Neverwas Rides a Plane: Wartime Autobiography as History; Epilogue: Searching for Roots: Modernist Echoes in the Post-Mao Era]
Fu, Po-shek. Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945. Stanford: SUP, 1993.
Galik, Marian. “Between the Garden of Gethsemane and Golgotha: The Last Night and Day of Jesus in Modern Chinese Literaturre (1921-1942).” Tamkang Review 31, 4-32,1 (Summer-Autumn 2001): 99-116.
Gao, Hua. How the Red Sun Rose: The Origin and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945. Translated by Stacey Mosher and Guo Jian. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2017.
[Abstract: This work offers the most comprehensive account of the origin and consequences of the Yan’an Rectification Movement from 1942 to 1945. The author argues that this campaign emancipated the Chinese Communist Party from Soviet-influenced dogmatism and unified the Party, preparing it for the final victory against the Nationalist Party in 1949. More importantly, this monograph shows in great detail how Mao Zedong established his leadership through this party-wide political movement by means of aggressive intra-party purges, thought control, coercive cadre examinations, and total reorganizations of the Party’s upper structure. The result of this movement not only set up the foundation for Mao’s new China, but also deeply influenced the Chinese political structure today. The Chinese version of How the Red Sun Rose was published in 2000, and has had nineteen printings since then.]
Gunn, Edward. The Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937-1945. NY: Columbia UP, 1980.
—–. “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.
—–. “Literature and Art of the War Period.” In James Hsiung et. al., eds., China’s Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937-1945. Armonk: ME Sharpe, 1993, 235-74.
Guo, Li. “Women’s Wartime Life Writing in Early Twentieth-century China.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17, 3 (2015).
Holm, David. “The Literary Rectification in Yan’an.” In W. Kubin and R. Wagner, eds., Essays in Modern Chinese Literature and Literary Criticism. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1982, 272-308.
—–. “Folk Art as Propaganda: The Yangge Movement in Yan’an.” In Bonnie McDougall, ed. Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the PRC, 1949-1979. Berkeley: UCP, 1984, 3-35.
—–. Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. [focuses on Yan’an]
Hsia, T. A. “Twenty Years after the Yenan Forum.” In Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968, 234-60.
Huang, Nicole. Written in the Ruins: War and Domesticity in Shanghai Literature of the 1940s. Ph.d. diss. Los Angeles: UCLA, 1998.
—–. “Fashioning Public Intellectuals: Women’s Print Culture in Occupied Shanghai (1941-1945).” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004, 325-45.
—–. Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
[Abstract: In December 1941, the fifth year in an all-scale cataclysmic Sino-Japanese war that devoured much of Eastern China, the city of Shanghai entered into an era of full occupation. This was the moment when a group of young women authors began writing and soon took over the cultural scene of the besieged metropolis.Women, War, Domesticity reconstructs cultures of reading, writing, and publishing in the city of Shanghai during the three years and eight months of Japanese occupation. It specifically depicts the formation of a new cultural arena initiated by a group of women who not only wrote, edited, and published, but also took part in defining and transforming the structure of modern knowledge, discussing it in various public forums surrounding the print media, and, consequently, promoting themselves as authoritative cultural commentators of the era.]
—–. “War, Revolution, and Urban Transformation: Chinese Literature of the Republican Era, 1920s-1940s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 54-66.
Hung, Chang-tai. “Female Symbols of Resistance in Chinese Wartime Spoken Drama.” Modern China 15 (April 1989): 149-177.
—–. War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945. Berkeley: UCP, 1994.
Huters, Ted . “Between Praxis and Essence: The Search for Cultural Expression in the Chinese Revolution.” In Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner eds., Marxism and the Chinese Experience. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989, 316-37.
Imbach, Jessica. “Variations on Gui and the Trouble with Ghosts in Modern Chinese Fiction.” Asia 70, 3 (2016: 865-80.
Ip, Hung-yok. Intellectuals in Revolutionary China, 1921-1949: Leaders, Heroes and Sophoisticates. NY: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005.
[Abstract: examines how prominent communist intellectuals in China during the revolutionary period (1921 to 1940) constructed and presented identities for themselves and how they narrated their place in the revolution. Table of Contents. Part 1: Introduction 1. Perspectives; Part 2: Leaders: Self-Construction from the Functional Perspective 2. Radical Intellectuals as the Guiding Force of Change: The Beginning of the Political Odyssey 3. Manufacturing Political Leadership I: The Yaqian Intellectuals and Peng Pai 4. Manufacturing Political Leadership II: Mao Zedong Part 3: Heroes: Self-Construction from the Emotional Perspective 5. Narrating Politicized Subjectivity 6. The Nobility of Ambivalence and Devotion Part 4: Sophisticates: Self-Construction from the Aesthetic Perspective 7. Clinging to Refinement in the Revolution Part 5: Epilogue 8. Self-Construction, Politics and Culture: Some General Reflections 9. Conclusion.]
Irving, Robert J. “Implementation of Mao Zedong’s Yan’an “Talks” in the Subei Base Area–The Chen Dengke 陈登科 ‘Phenomenon.'” Asian Studies Review 40, 3 (2016): 360-376.
[Abstract: Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” were officially established as the foundation of national policy on culture after the founding of the People’s Republic, but from the very outset they had direct implications for writers and artists in the Communist base areas of the time. As a case study of the implementation of the spirit of Mao’s “Talks” prior to 1949, this paper will discuss how illiterate peasant soldier Chen Dengke (1919–98) was educated by Party cultural cadres in the North Jiangsu (Subei) Base Area, enabling him within the space of just four years to produce a novella and a novel. In order to critically examine the auto/biographical and “slice of life” writings on which this paper relies, brief discussion will be provided of temporal considerations and genre boundaries of this class of writing in the context of the ever-changing political orthodoxy with which writers were required to comply during the Maoist period. The creation of what has been called the Chen Dengke “phenomenon” is not only a fascinating story, but also illustrates the operation of Communist Party cultural policy during the Sino-Japanese and Civil Wars.]
Iwasaki, Clara. Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions across the Pacific. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Kyle Shernuk]
Jiang, Hui. “1943, April: The Genesis of Peasant Revolutionary Literature.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 500-6.
Judd, Ellen. “Prelude to the ‘Yan’an Talks’: Problems in Transforming a Literary Intelligentsia.” Modern China 11, 4 (1985): 377-408.
—–. “Cultural Articulation in the Chinese Countryside, 1937-1947.” Modern China 16, 3 (July 1990): 269-304.
Kang, Xiaofei. Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Enchanted Revolution moves religion and gender to center stage in the Chinese Communist revolution, examining the mobilizational dynamics of anti-superstition propaganda in support of the Communist Party’s rise from rural backwaters to national dominance. Kang argues that religion was not merely adversary for the revolutionaries-it also served as a model for the ways in which the Party mobilized support and constructed legitimacy. In this parallel and often paradoxical process, the Party attacked “superstitions” that had long supported the foundations of Chinese religious life. At the same time, Party propaganda co-opted these same religious resources for its own political ends. Kang demonstrates that the persuasive power of Party propaganda relied heavily on recasting the cosmic forces of yin and yang that sustained the traditional gender hierarchy and ritual order. Moreover, revolutionary art and literature revamped old narratives of female ghosts and ritual exorcism to inject the people with a new masculinist vision of the Party-state endowed with both scientific potency and the heavenly mandate. Gendered language and symbolism in Chinese religion thus remained central to inspiring pathos, ethos, and logos for the revolution. Enchanted Revolution sheds light on the contemporary significance of the Maoist legacy in China through a deft exploration of the complex interplay of religion, gender, and revolution.]
Kondo, Tatsuya. “The Transmission of the Yenan Talks to Chungking and Hu Feng: Caught Between the Struggle for Democracy in the Great Rear Area and Maoism.” Acta Asiatica 72 (1997): 81-105.
La litterature chinoise au temps de la Geurre de resistance contre le Japon. Paris: Editions de la Fondation Singer-Polignac, 1982. [collection of essay on literature of the war period]
Laughlin, Charles A. Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. [MCLC Resource Center Publication review by Susan Daruvala]
—–. “The Battlefield fo Cultural Production: Chinese Literary Mobilization during the War Years.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 2, 1 (July 1998): 83-103.
—–. “The All-China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 379-412.
Lee, Haiyan. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. [MCLC Resource Center review by Charles Laughlin]
Liu, Jianmei. “Gender Politics: Social Space and Volatile Bodies, 1937-1945.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 2, 1 (July 1998): 53-82.
Liu, Yu. “Maoist Discourse and the Mobilization of Emotions in Revolutionary China.” Modern China 36, 3 (2010): 329-362.
[Abstract: This article focuses on how Maoist discourse engineered revolutionary emotions as a method of political mobilization. Based on personal memoirs and eyewitness accounts, it argues that the Maoist discourse can be disaggregated into three themes, each aimed at provoking one type of emotion: the theme of victimization, which mobilized indignation in struggle campaigns; the theme of redemption, which generated guilt in thought reform campaigns; and the theme of emancipation, which raised euphoria in social transformation campaigns. It also argues that Maoist discourse propagation employed three techniques—personalization, magnification, and moralization—and emphasizes that these techniques of propagation are as important as the content of the three themes in the production of passions.]
Liu, Zhuo. “Wengongtuan and the Rural Literary Popularization Movement in Yan’an.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 1 (2012): 39-55.
[Abstract: This paper takes the folk song collection movement in Yan’an as an example to examine the role of the wengongtuan (The League of Literary and Artistic Workers) in organizing the rural literary popularization movement in the 1940s. Dispatched by the Communist Party of China (CPC), wengongtuan members took on the task of mobilizing peasants into cultural production, and realized a self-reconstruction in the process of integrating themselves into the lives of revolutionary peasants. The idea of the wengongtuan derived from the CPC’s theory of the mass line–“from the masses and to the masses”–which laid the foundation of New Democratic culture in the 1940s.]
Luo, Di. Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945. Leiden: Brill, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Frederik H. Green]
Neder, Christina. “Censorship in Republican China.” In Derek Jones, ed., Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999.
Okada, Hideki. “The Realities of Racial Harmony: The Case of the Translator Ouchi Takao.” Acta Asiatica 72 (1997): 61-80.
Qian, Kun. “Gendering National Imagination: Heroines and the Return of the Foundational Family in Shanghai during the War of Resistance to Japan.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 1 (March 2014): 78-100.
[Abstract: During the War of Resistance to Japan (1937¡V45), the cultural scene in Japanese-occupied Shanghai took on a “feminine” quality, as female leads dominated stage performance and film screens. This essay seeks to engage this gendered phenomenon through examples of Ouyang Yuqian’s wartime play Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan) and the film Mulan Joins the Army (Mulan congjun). Borrowing affect theory in conjunction with the gendered perception of modernity, the author argues that these representations of female characters, on the one hand, highlight the subjective projection of male intellectuals motivated by intense feelings of shame and anger, which constitutes a feminized national imagination encountering the colonial Other. On the other hand, such representations continue the May Fourth project of enlightening and liberating woman from the conventional family while reintroducing the concept of the nation in the family setting and proposing the foundational family as the basic unit of the new nation.]
Qian, Liqun. “The Cultural and Political Significance of Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 495-500.
Rosenmeier, Christopher John. Shanghai Avant-garde: The Fiction of Shi Zhecun, Mu Shiying, Xu Xu, and Wumingshi. Ph. D. diss. London: University of London, 2006.
—–. On the Margins of Modernism: Xu Xu, Wumingshi and Popular Chinese Literature in the 1940s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. [MCLC Resource Center review by Angie Chau]
[Abstract: Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), but although they were an integral part of the Chinese literary scene their bestselling fiction has been given scant attention in histories of Chinese writing. This groundbreaking book, the first book-length study of Xu Xu and Wumingshi in English or any other western language, re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940s. With in-depth analyses of their innovative short stories and novels, Christopher Rosenmeier demonstrates how these important writers incorporated and adapted narrative techniques from Shanghai modernist writers like Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, contesting the view that modernism had little lasting impact in China and firmly positioning these two figures within the literature of their times.]
Rubin, Kyna. “Writers’ Discontent and Party Repsonse in Yan’an Before ‘Wild Lily’: The Manchurian Writers and Zhou Yang.” Modern Chinese Literature 1, 1 (1984): 79-102.
Sakaguchi, Naoki. Shi wu nian zhanzheng qi de Zhongguo wenxue (Chinese literature during the fifteen years of the war period). Tr. Song Yijing. Banqiao: Daoxiang, 2001.
Smith, Norman. “‘I Am an Ordinary Woman’: Yang Xu and the Articulation of Chinese Ideals of Womanhood in Japanese Occupied Manchuria.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 8, 3 (2002): 35-54.
[Yang Xu’s (1918- ) second volume of collected works, My Diary (Wo de riji; 1944), articulates the key themes that prevailed in Chinese women’s literature in the Japanese colonial state of Manzhouguo. In Manzhouguo, literature was a vital domain for the negotiation of Chinese cultural identities in a Japanese colonial context. This paper seeks to reveal how Yang Xu, like other contemporary Chinese women writers in Manzhouguo, was driven by the May Fourth ideals of women’s emancipation that dominated social discourse in the Republic of China during the 1920s to defy the conservative cultural aspirations of the Japanese colonial regime.]
—–. “Disrupting Narratives: Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Cultural Agenda in Manchuria, 1936-1945.” Modern China 30, 3 (2004): 295-325.
[This article assesses the lives, careers, and literary legacies of the most prominent Chinese women writers during the latter stage of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. The article reveals how they articulated dissatisfaction with the Japanese cultural agenda while working within Japanese colonial institutions. Empowered by ineffectual state policies and misogynous official neglect, the women embarked on a decade-long quest to describe and expose the reality of Chinese women’s lives under Japanese occupation. May Fourth ideals of women’s emancipation inspired them to forge careers as critics of Japan’s cultural agenda, and they undermined Japanese efforts to sever ties between Manchuria and the rest of China. This study adds to a growing body of recent critical scholarship incorporating Chinese-language sources into received interpretations of Japan’s colonial state of Manchukuo.]
—–. “Regulating Chinese Women’s Sexuality During the Japanese Occupation of Manchuria: Between the Lines of Wu Ying’s “Yu” (Lust) and Yang Xu’s Wo de Riji (My Diary).” Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, 1 (Jan. 2004): 49-70.
—–. “The Difficulties of Despair: Dan Di and Chinese Literary Production in Manchukuo.” Journal of Women’s Studies 18, 1 (2006): 77-100.
—–. Resisting Manchukuo: Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Occupation. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Heng hsing Liu]
[Abstract: This volume reveals the literary world of Japanese-occupied Manchuria (Manchukuo, 1932-45) and examines the lives, careers, and literary legacies of seven prolific Chinese women writers during the period: Dan Di, Lan Ling, Mei Niang, Wu Ying, Yang Xu, Zhu Ti, and Zuo Di. Smith shows how a complex blend of fear and freedom produced an environment in which Chinese women writers could articulate dissatisfaction with the overtly patriarchal and imperialist nature of the Japanese cultural agenda while working in close association with colonial institutions.]
Smith, Norman and Annika A. Culver, eds. Manchukuo Perspectives Transnational Approaches to Literary Production. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
[Abstract: This groundbreaking volume critically examines how writers in Japanese-occupied northeast China negotiated political and artistic freedom while engaging their craft amidst an increasing atmosphere of violent conflict and foreign control. The allegedly multiethnic utopian new state of Manchukuo (1932–1945) created by supporters of imperial Japan was intended to corral the creative energies of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Russians, and Mongols. Yet, the twin poles of utopian promise and resistance to a contested state pulled these intellectuals into competing loyalties, selective engagement, or even exile and death—surpassing neat paradigms of collaboration or resistance. In a semicolony wrapped in the utopian vision of racial inclusion, their literary works articulating national ideals and even the norms of everyday life subtly reflected the complexities and contradictions of the era. Scholars from China, Korea, Japan, and North America investigate cultural production under imperial Japan’s occupation of Manchukuo. They reveal how literature and literary production more generally can serve as a penetrating lens into forgotten histories and the lives of ordinary people confronted with difficult political exigencies. Highlights of the text include transnational perspectives by leading researchers in the field and a memoir by one of Manchukuo’s last living writers.]
Song, Mingwei. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015.
[Abstract: The rise of youth is among the most dramatic stories of modern China. Since the last years of the Qing dynasty, youth has been made a new agent of history in Chinese intellectuals’ visions of national rejuvenation through such tremendously popular notions as “young China” and “new youth.” The characterization of a young protagonist with a developmental story has also shaped the modern Chinese novel. Young China takes youth as a central literary motif that was profoundly related to the ideas of nationhood and modernity in twentieth-century China. A synthesis of narrative theory and cultural history, it combines historical investigations of the origin and development of the modern Chinese youth discourse with close analyses of the novelistic construction of the Chinese Bildungsroman, which depicts the psychological growth of youth with a symbolic allusion to national rejuvenation. Negotiating between self and society, ideal and action, and form and reality, such a narrative manifests as well as complicates the various political and cultural symbolisms invested in youth through different periods of modern Chinese history. In this story of young China, the restless, elusive, and protean image of youth both perpetuates and problematizes the ideals of national rejuvenation.]
Sorokin, V. F. “Chinese Literature at the End of the 1940’s (On the Problem of the Development of Realism).” In Understanding Modern China: Problems and Methods. European Association of Chinese Studies, 26th Conference of Chinese Studies. Rome: Ismeo, 1979, 133-42.
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.]
Thornber, Karen Laura. Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009.
[Abstract: By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.]
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.
Wang, Ban, ed. Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
[Abstract: As China joins the capitalist world economy, the problems of social disintegration that gave rise to the earlier revolutionary social movements are becoming pressing. Instead of viewing the Chinese Revolution as an academic study, these essays suggest that the motifs of the Revolution are still alive and relevant. The slogan “Farewell to Revolution” that obscures the revolutionary language is premature. In spite of dislocations and ruptures in the revolutionary language, to rethink this discourse is to revisit a history in terms of sedimented layers of linguistic meanings and political aspirations. Earlier meanings of revolutionary words may persist or coexist with non-revolutionary rivals. Recovery of the vital uses of key revolutionary words proffers critical alternatives in which contemporary capitalist myths can be contested.]
Wang, Ban. “Chinese Revolution and Western Literature.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 473-78.
Wang, Hui. “Local Forms, Vernacular Dialects, and the War of Resistance against Japan: The National Forms Debate.” Tr. Chris Berry. In Wang, The Politics of Imagining Asia. Ed. Theodore Huters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 95-135.
Wang, Minmin. “Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art.” In Ray Heisey, ed., Chinese Perspectives in Rhetoric and Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing, 2000, 179-96.
Wang, Xiaoping. “From ‘Use of Old Forms’ to “Establishment of a National Form: A Reevaluation of Mao’s Agenda of Forging a Cultural-Political Nation.” International Critical Thought 2, 2 (2013): 183-96.
[Abstract; This paper aims to re-examine the important debates about ‘use of old forms’ and ‘establishment of a national form’ in Chinese intellectual circles of the 1940s. It discusses the contemporary referents of the ‘form’ and ‘content’ in the term ‘(national) form’ and explores the intricate relationship among literary language use, class consciousness, and a national culture. As a conclusion, it suggests that Mao’s agenda of creating a ‘national form’ was not merely a means of achieving popularization but an end aimed at creating a revolutionary culture to facilitate the establishment of a homogenized and egalitarian society, or to forge a powerful cultural–political nation. This effort merits reappraisal in contemporary China, when differing interests and newly divided classes make the national consensus highly vulnerable.]
—–. Contending for the “Chinese Modern”: The Writing of Fiction in the Great Transformative Epoch of Modern China, 1937-1949. Leiden: Brill, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Christopher Rosenmeier]
Wilcox, Emily. Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Xiaomei Chen]
[Abstract: Revolutionary Bodies is the first English-language primary source–based history of concert dance in the People’s Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Emily Wilcox analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China’s dance field. The digital edition of this title includes nineteen embedded videos of selected dance works discussed by the author.]
Willmott, Mary Katharine and Yu Teh-chi. “The War in Chinese Poetry.” Asia (New York) 43, 7 (July 1943).
Xie, Miya Qiong. “The Unspeakability of War Rape: Literary Representations of War Rape during the Sino-Japanese War.” Harvard Asia Quarterly (Fall 2014): 42-9.
—–. Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Xiao Hong, Yom Sang-sop, Abe Kobo, and Zhong Lihe—these iconic literary figures from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all described Manchuria extensively in their literary works. Now China’s Northeast—but a contested frontier in the first half of the twentieth century—Manchuria has inspired writers from all over East Asia to claim it as their own, employing novel themes and forms for engaging nation and empire in modern literature. Many of these works have been canonized as quintessential examples of national or nationalist literature—even though they also problematize the imagined boundedness and homogeneity of nation and national literature at its core. Through the theoretical lens of literary territorialization, Miya Xie reconceptualizes modern Manchuria as a critical site for making and unmaking national literatures in East Asia. Xie ventures into hitherto uncharted territory by comparing East Asian literatures in three different languages and analyzing their close connections in the transnational frontier. By revealing how writers of different nationalities constantly enlisted transnational elements within a nation-centered body of literature, Territorializing Manchuria uncovers a history of literary co-formation at the very site of division and may offer insights for future reconciliation in the region.]
Xie, Zhixi. “The Historical Tragedy and the Human Tragedy–The Depiction and the Discussion of the Historical Plays During the War of Resistance Against Japan.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 3, 1 (March 2009): 64-96.
Xiong, Ying. Representing Empire: Japanese Colonial Literature in Taiwan and Manchuria. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
[Abstract: In Representing Empire Ying Xiong examines Japanese-language colonial literature written by Japanese expatriate writers in Taiwan and Manchuria. Drawing on a wide range of Japanese and Chinese sources, Representing Empire reveals not only a nuanced picture of Japanese literary terrain but also the interplay between imperialism, nationalism, and Pan-Asianism in the colonies. While the existing literature on Japanese nationalism has largely remained within the confines of national history, by using colonial literature as an example, Ying Xiong demonstrates that transnational forces shaped Japanese nationalism in the twentieth century. With its multidisciplinary and comparative approach, Representing Empire adds to a growing body of literature that challenges traditional interpretations of Japanese nationalism and national literary canon.]
Xu, Zhenglin. “Modern Chinese Writers’ Thoughts on Religion During the Sino-Japanese War.” Monumenta Serica 54 (2006): 355-62.
Yan, Haiping. “War, Death, and the Art of Existence: Mobile Women in the 1940s.” In Yan, Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948. London: Routledge, 2006, 135-67.
Yeh, Wen-hsin, ed. Wartime Shanghai. NY: Routledge, 1998.
Zhang, Yu. Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915-1965. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2020, 79-143.
Zhong, Yurou. Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916-1958. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Shuheng (Diana) Zhang]
Zhou, Xiaoyi and Q. S. Tong. “The Problem of the Subject and Literary Modernity: Mao Zedong’s Theory of Art Revisited.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 32/33 (2000/2001): 135-56
Zhu, Pingchao. Wartime Culture in Guilin: 1938-1944: A City at War. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.
[Abstract: This study challenges existing historiography on China’s wartime culture at three levels. First, the Guangxi warlord group played a crucial role in maintaining regional security, providing a liberalized political environment for wartime cultural activities and facilitating wartime nationalist–communist relations at both local and national levels. Second, wartime culture was more literary than political and it reflected a powerful intellectual vigor that was an indispensable component of China’s war efforts. Intellectuals of different social and political backgrounds were their own “organic” selves feeling no pressure to come to intellectual consensus in literary production. Third, wartime culture was characterized by the active participation of many international groups, political organizations, and foreign individuals. The literary works produced in Guilin between 1938 and 1944 clearly reflected a combination of Chinese national and international anti-fascist and anti-military sentiment. Chinese literary masterpieces were translated into different foreign languages and noted foreign literature and political works were introduced to Chinese audiences through various cultural and political exchange programs in the city.].