Theme – 1 | MCLC Resource Center

General Studies

Akiyama, Masayuki and Yiu-nam Leung, eds. Crosscurrents in the Literatures of Asia and the West: Essays in Honor of A. Owen Aldridge. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London; Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997.

Anderson, Marsten. The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Anagnost, Ann. National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Ang, Ien. “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm.” Boundary 2. Special Issue ed. Rey Chow. 25, 2 (Fall 1998): 47-76.

Bachner, Andrea. “Graphic Germs: Mediality, Virulence, Chinese Writing.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, 1 (Spring 2011): 197-225.

Bachner, Andrea. Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture. NY: Columbia University Press, 2014.

[Abstract: New communication and information technologies provide distinct challenges and possibilities for the Chinese script, which, unlike alphabetic or other phonetic scripts, relies on multiple signifying principles. In recent decades, this multiplicity has generated a rich corpus of reflection and experimentation in literature, film, visual and performance art, and design and architecture, within both China and different parts of the West. Approaching this history from a variety of alternative theoretical perspectives, Beyond Sinology reflects on the Chinese script to pinpoint the multiple connections between languages, scripts, and medial expressions and cultural and national identities. Through a complex study of intercultural representations, exchanges, and tensions, the text focuses on the concrete “scripting” of identity and alterity, advancing a new understanding of the links between identity and medium and a critique of articulations that rely on single, monolithic, and univocal definitions of writing. Chinese writing–with its history of divergent readings in Chinese and non-Chinese contexts, with its current reinvention in the age of new media and globalization–can teach us how to read and construct mediality and cultural identity in interculturally responsible ways and also how to scrutinize, critique, and yet appreciate and enjoy the powerful multi-medial creativity embodied in writing.]

Barlow, Tani E. The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. [MCLC Resource Center review by Megan M. Ferry]

[Abstract: A history of thinking about the subject of women in twentieth-century China. Barlow illustrates the theories and conceptual categories that Enlightenment Chinese intellectuals have developed to describe the collectivity of women. Demonstrating how generations of these theorists have engaged with international debates over eugenics, gender, sexuality, and the psyche, Barlow argues that as an Enlightenment project, feminist debate in China is at once Chinese and international. Noting the eugenicist roots of much twentieth-century feminist thought, she describes how the emergence of the social sciences in the 1920s, in China and elsewhere, lent the liberation of women a particular urgency by suggesting that the health of nations and races rested in part on the biological mechanisms of natural selection and therefore on women’s responsibility to select sexual partners.]

Benton, Gregor and Alan Hunter. Wild Lily, Prairie Fire: China’s Road to Democracy, Yan’an to Tian’anmen, 1942-1989. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.

Berry, Michael. A History of Pain: Literary and Cinematic Mappings of Violence in Modern China. Ph. D. diss. New York: Columbia University, 2004.

Birch, Cyril. “Change and Continuity in Chnese Fiction.” In M. Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1977, 385-406.

Braester, Yomi. Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

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 of literature 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, Leo Tak-Hung. “First Imitate, then Translate: Histories of the Introduction of Stream-of-Consciousness Fiction to China.” Meta: Journal des traducteurs 49, 3 (2004): 681-91.

[Abstract: In China, stream-of-consciousness (SOC) fiction had for some time been thought of as untranslatable. By contrast, SOC imitations appeared in abundance through the twentieth century, attempted by several Chinese writers who consciously used the technique in their own novels, first in the thirties, then in the sixties, and finally in the eighties. It was not until the nineties, however, that the “difficult” novels by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, among others, were translated. How can we understand the phenomenon of translations following imitations in the history of SOC fiction as introduced to China?]

Chan, Roy Bing. The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. [MCLC Resource Center review by Laurence Coderre]

[Abstract: The Edge of Knowing explores the relationship between the rhetoric of dreams and realist literary practice in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period just following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The writers’ attention to dreams demonstrates the multiple influences of Western psychology, utopian desire for revolutionary change, and the enduring legacy of traditional Chinese philosophy. At the same time, modern Chinese writers used their work to represent social reality for the purpose of nation-building. Recent political usage of dream rhetoric in the People’s Republic of China attests to the continuing influence of dreams on the imagination of Chinese modernity. By employing a number of critical perspectives, The Edge of Knowing will appeal to readers seeking to understand the complicated relationship between literary form and Chinese history and politics.]

Chang, Shuei-May, ed. Casting Off the Shackles of Family: Ibsen’s Nora Figure in Modern Chinese Literature, 1918-1942. Peter Lang, 2002.

Chen, Jannis Jizhou. “The Feeling of Ling (the Numinous): Human-Animal Relations in Three Sinophone Short Stories.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 33, 2 (Fall 2021): 169-204.

Chen, Pingyuan. “An Audible China: Speech and the Innovation in Modern Chinese Writing.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 3, 2 (June 2009): 270-32.

Chen, Xiaomei. Occidentalism: A Theory of Counterdiscourse in Post-Mao China. NY: Oxford UP, 1995.

—–. “Introduction to Occidentalism.” In Diana Bryden, ed., Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. NY: Routledge, 2000.

Chen, Maiping. “The Individual in the Shadow of the Whole: The Self in Modern Chinese Literature.” Stockholm Journal of East Asian Studies 6 (1995): 39-70.

Chen, Sihe. “On ‘Invisible Writing’ in the History of Contemporary Chinese Literature 1949-1976.” Tr. Hongbing Zhang. MCLC Resource Center Publication, 2000.

Chen-Andro, Chantal. Les grands probèmes du roman en Chine au 20e siècle, in Litteratures d’extrême- orient au xxe siècle. Arles: Philippe Picquier, 1993.

Chi, Ta-wei. “Performers of the Paternal Past: History, Female Impersonators, and Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction.” positions: asia cultures critque 15, 3 (Winter 2007): 580-608.

[deals with the following texts: Ba Jin’s Jiliu sanbuqu (Torrent trilogy; 1931, 1938, 1940), Wang Dulu’s Yanshi xialing (Peking chivalric entertainer; 1948), Qin Shou’ou’s Qiuhaitang (Begonia; 1942), Lilian Lee’s Bawang bieji (Farewell my concubine; 1985), and Ling Li’s Mengduan guanhe (Dreams broken across China; 1999)]

Chi, Pang-yuan and David Der-wei Wang, eds. Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000.

Chow, Rey. “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem.” Boundary 2. Special Issue ed. Rey Chow. 25, 2 (Fall 1998): 1-24.

—–. ed. Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Originally published as special issue of boundary 2 25, 3 (1998).

Chung, Hilary, ed. In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and China. Amsterdam: Editions Rodolpi, 1996.

Cohen, Myron. “Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China: The Case of the Chinese ‘Peasant.'” Daedalus 122, 2 (1993): 151-70.

Choy, Howard Y. F. Discourses of Disease: Writing Illness, the Mind and the Body in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

[Abstract: The meanings of disease have undergone such drastic changes with the introduction of modern Western medicine into China during the last two hundred years that new discourses have been invented to theorize illness, redefine health, and reconstruct classes and genders. As a consequence, medical literature is rewritten with histories of hygiene, studies of psychopathology, and stories of cancer, disabilities and pandemics. This edited volume includes studies of discourses about both bodily and psychiatric illness in modern China, bringing together ground-breaking scholarships that reconfigure the fields of history, literature, film, psychology, anthropology, and gender studies by tracing the pathological path of the “Sick Man of East Asia” through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the new millennium.]

Denton, Kirk A. The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Denton, Kirk A. and Michel Hockx, eds. Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. [MCLC Resource Center review by John Christopher Hamm]

Diefenbach, Thilo. Kontext der Gewalt in moderner chinesicher Literatur (Context of force in modern Chinese literature). Weisbaden: Harrasowitz, 2004.

Dikotter, Frank. Sex, Culture, and Modernity in China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.

—–. “Culture, Race, and Nation: The Formation of National Identity in Twentieth Century China.” The Journal of International Affairs. Special issue on contemporary China (Winter 1996).

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.

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.

Dooling, Amy. Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

[Abstract: This is a critical inquiry into the connections between emergent feminist ideologies in China and the production of ‘modern’ women’s writing from the demise of the last imperial dynasty to the founding of the PRC. It accentuates both well-known and under-represented literary voices who intervened in the gender debates of their generation as well as contextualises the strategies used in imagining alternative stories of female experience and potential. It asks two questions: First, how did the advent of enlightened views of gender relations and sexuality influence literary practices of ‘new women’ in terms of narrative forms and strategies, readership, and publication venues? Second, how do these representations attest to the way these female intellectuals engaged and expanded social and political concerns from the personal to the national? Contents: Introduction: Women and Feminism in the Literary History of Early Twentieth-century China; National Imaginaries: Feminist Fantasies at the Turn-of-the-Century; The New Woman’s Woman Love and/or Revolution?: Fictions of the Feminine Self in the 1930s Cultural Left; Outwitting Patriarchy: Comic Narrative Strategies in the Works of Yang Jiang, Su Qing, and Zhang Ailing; A World Still to Win]

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.

Esherick, Joseph, ed. Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000.

Fan, Shouyi. “Translation of English Fiction and Drama in Modern China: Social Context, Literary Trends and Impact.” Meta XLIV, 1 (1999).

—–. “Highlights of Translation Studies in China Since the Mid Nineteenth Century.” Meta XLIV, 1 (1999).

Farquhar, Mary Ann. “Through the Looking Glass: Children’s Stories and Social Change in China, 1918-1976.” 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, 173-198.

—–. Children’s Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.

Feng, Jin. “Narrating Suffering, Constructing Chinese Modernity: The Emergence of the Modern Subject in Chinese Literature.” East Asia 18, 1 (Spring 2000): 82-109.

—–. The Transpacific Flow: Creative Writing Programs in China. Ann Arbor: AAS Shorts, 2024.

[Abstract: What happens when a US cultural institution is imported to China, the purported chief rival of the United States in the twenty-first century? The first book-length account of university-based creative writing programs in China, this book reveals how Chinese intellectuals adapt American-style writing programs such as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the International Writing Program at Chinese universities to seek agency and literary innovation in the last two decades. The rise of creative writing programs in China explains broader issues of cultural production in an increasingly authoritarian and market-oriented postsocialist state. By telling a unique story of Chinese intellectuals’ interactions with an influential Western cultural institution, this book also shows how varied cultural and geopolitical priorities can rewrite the story of the global influence of the United States.]

Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei. “Tradition and Experiment in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Albert Feuerwerker, ed., Modern China. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

—–. Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant “Other” in Modern Chinese Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Findeison, Raoul. “Kairos or the Due Time: On Date, Dates, and Dating in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Findeison and Gassmann, eds., Autumn Floods: Essays in Honour of Marian Galik. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997.

—–. “Anarchist or Saint? On the Spread of “Wisdom” (Sophia) in Modern Chinese Literature.” Asiatica Venetiana 3 (1998).

Foster, Paul B. “Ah Q Progeny–Son of Ah Q, Modern Ah Q, Miss Ah Q, Sequels to Ah Q–Post-1949 Creative Intersections with the Ah Discourse.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, 2, (Fall 2004): 184-234

Fruehauf, Heinrich. “Urban Exoticism in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature.” In Ellen Widmer and David Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentiety-Century China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993, 133-64.

Galik, Marian. Preliminary Research-Guide: German Impact on Modern Chinese Intellectual History. Munich: Seminar für Ostasiatische Kultur- und Sprachwissenschaft, 1971.

—-. “Mayakovsky in China.” Asian and African Studies (Bratislava) 14 (1978): 159-74.

—–. “Goethe in China (1932).” Asian and African Studies (Bratislava) 14 (1978): 11-25.

—–. Milestones in Sino-Western Literary Confrontation (1898-1979). Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986.

Galikowski, Maria. Art and Politics in China, 1949-1984. HK: Chinese University of HK Press, 1998.

Gamsa, Mark. The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual Practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. [MCLC Resource Center review by Roy Chan]

[Abstract: A comparative cultural and intellectual history, this study treats the reception of Russian literature in twentieth-century China, highlighting its elevation as a model for personal behaviouras well as for collective revolutionary struggle–“a moral example and manual of practice”. Analyzing the Chinese reading of Russian nineteenth-century literature and early Soviet fiction, Gamsa explains what led readers to a particularly close engagement with this literature and examines in fascinating detail the forms that this engagement took. Addressed to all those interested in the passage of ideas between cultures, this book makes an innovative contribution to research in modern Chinese and Russian history and literature, comparative literature, and book history.

Gasster, Michael. “Intellectuals, Revolution, Modernization: Reflections on Twentieth-Century China.” In David C. Buxbaum and Frederick W. Mote, eds., Transition and Permanence: Chinese History and Culture. HK: Cathay Press, 1972, 103-22.

Goldman, Merle and Leo Ou-fan Lee. An Intellectual History of Modern China. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Gu, Tian. “Westernization or Localization? The (Mis)reading of ‘the Tragic’ in Modern Chinese Literary Discourse.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 25, 2 (2023).

[Abstract: This paper examines the features and causal factors in constructing an idea of the tragic in modern Chinese literary discourse. It attempts at revisiting and reproducing the realities of misreading and variation upon modern Chinese introduction of the term “tragedy” (beiju) at different socio-historical periods, and has observed the interplay between two trends, namely, Westernization and localization, through the negotiation of “the tragic” into modern Chinese literary practice. These two trends have been integrated by a political and pragmatic perspective, which dominates the formation of a modern Chinese literary discourse on “the tragic”. This perspective offers both possibility and legitimacy for certain deliberate misreading, thus endows modern Chinese tragic tradition with unique features different from its Western models. This paper holds that modern Chinese intellectuals approached the idea of the tragic more at an instrumentalist level; they retained the connotation of the term in their attempt of Westernization, and altered and reconstructed the denotations of the term as their efforts of localization. For this reason, modern Chinese reading of “the tragic” is not so much as a pure passive acceptance as an active endeavor to deliberately misread this alien concept for the renovation of the then existing Chinese literary tradition.]

Gunn, Edward. Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

—–. “Gender and Performativity in Contemporary Narratives from Taiwan and China.” In Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang and Michelle Yeh, eds., Contemporary Chinese Literature: Crossing the Boundaries. Special issue of Literature East and West. Austin, TX: Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, 1995, 5-24.

Guo, Jie. “From Patriarchal Polygamy to Conjugal Monogamy: Imagining Male Same-Sex Relationship in Modern China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, 1 (Spring 2013): 165-205.

Gvili, Gal. Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895-1962. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.

[Abstract: Gvili examines how Chinese writers’ image of India shaped the making of a new literature and spurred efforts to achieve literary decolonization. She argues that multifaceted visions of Sino-Indian connections empowered Chinese literary figures to resist Western imperialism and its legacies through novel forms and genres. However, Gvili demonstrates, the Global North and its authority mediated Chinese visions of Sino-Indian pasts and futures.]

Hagenaar, Elly. Stream of Consciousness and Free Indirect Discourse in Modern Chinese Literature. Leiden: Centre of Non-Western Studies, Leiden University.

He, Chengzhou. Henrik Ibsen and Modern Chinese Drama. Oslo: Unipub AS, 2004. [pdf file downlaod from Ibsen in China website]

Hockx, Michel. “The Involutionary Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Kam Louie, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 235-52.

Hockx, Michel, ed. The Literary Field in Twentieth-Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999.

Hodge, Bob and Kam Louie. The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture: The Art of Reading Dragons. NY: Routledge, 1998.

Hsia, Adrian. Kafka and China. Bern: Peter Lang, 1996.

Huang, Alexander C. Y. Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

[Abstract: For close to two hundred years, the ideas of Shakespeare have inspired incredible work in the literature, fiction, theater, and cinema of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. From the novels of Lao She and Lin Shu to Lu Xun’s search for a Chinese “Shakespeare,” and from Feng Xiaogang’s martial arts films to labor camp memoirs, Soviet-Chinese theater, Chinese opera in Europe, and silent film, Shakespeare has been put to work in unexpected places, yielding a rich trove of transnational imagery and paradoxical citations in popular and political culture. Chinese Shakespeares is the first book to concentrate on both Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare’s appearance in Sinophone culture and their ambiguous relationship to the postcolonial question. Substantiated by case studies of major cultural events and texts from the first Opium War in 1839 to our times, Chinese Shakespeares theorizes competing visions of “China” and “Shakespeare” in the global cultural marketplace and challenges the logic of fidelity-based criticism and the myth of cultural exclusivity. In his critique of the locality and ideological investments of authenticity in nationalism, modernity, Marxism, and personal identities, Huang reveals the truly transformative power of Chinese Shakespeares.]

Huang, Xuelei. Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: In this vivid and highly original reading of recent Chinese history, Xuelei Huang documents the eclectic array of smells that permeated Chinese life from the High Qing through to the Mao period. Utilising interdisciplinary methodology and critically engaging with scholarship in the expanding fields of sensory and smell studies, she shows how this period of tumultuous change in China was experienced through the body and the senses. Drawing on unexplored archival materials, readers are introduced to the ‘smellscapes’ of China from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century via perfumes, food, body odours, public health projects, consumerism and cosmetics, travel literature, fiction and political language. This pioneering and evocative study takes the reader on a sensory journey through modern Chinese history, examining the ways in which the experience of scent and modernity have intertwined.]

Huters, Theodore. “Lives in Profile: On the Authorial Voice in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature.” In E. Widmer and D. Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

, 1993, 269-94.

—–, ed. Reading the Modern Chinese Short Story. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1990.

Iovene, Paola. Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.

[Abstract: st studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation building, and with the utopian visions broadcast by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future is thus understood as a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces “anticipation”–the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds–as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture from the 1950s to 2011. In doing so, Paola Iovene connects the emergence of new literary genres with changing visions of the future in contemporary China. This book provides a nuanced and dynamic account of the relationship between state discourses, market pressures, and individual writers and texts. It stresses authors’ and editors’ efforts to redefine what constitutes literature under changing political and economic circumstances. Engaging with questions of translation, temporality, formation of genres, and stylistic change, Iovene mines Chinese science fiction and popular science, puts forward a new interpretation of familiar Chinese avant-garde fiction, and offers close readings of texts that have not yet received any attention in English-language scholarship. Far-ranging in its chronological scope and impressive in its interdisciplinary approach, this book rethinks the legacies of socialism in postsocialist Chinese literary modernity.]

Iovene, Paola and Federico Picerni. “Chinese Workers’ Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Literature. (2022).

Ip, Hung-yok. “Politics and Individuality in Communist Revolutionary Culture.” Modern China 23, 1 (Jan. 1997): 33-68.

Isaacs, Harold R. Re-encounters in China: Notes of a Journey in a Time Capsule. HK: Joint Publishing, 1985.

[Abstract: Memoir of Isaacs’ return to China in 1980; includes accounts of meetings with Mao Dun, Ding Ling, and reflections on Lu Xun]

Jiang, Tao and Philip J. Ivanhoe, eds. The Reception and Rendition of Freud in China: China’s Freudian Slip. NY: Routledge, 2012.

[Abstract: Although Freud makes only occasional, brief references to China and Chinese culture in his works, for almost a hundred years many leading Chinese intellectuals have studied and appropriated various Freudian theories. However, whilst some features of Freud’s views have been warmly embraced from the start and appreciated for their various explanatory and therapeutic values, other aspects have been vigorously criticized as implausible or inapplicable to the Chinese context. This book explores the history, reception, and use of Freud and his theories in China, and makes an original and substantial contribution to our understanding of the Chinese people and their culture as well as to our appreciation of western attempts to understand the people and culture of China. The essays are organised around three key areas of research. First, it examines the historical background concerning the China-Freud connection in the 20th century, before going on to use reconstructed Freudian theories in order to provide a modernist critique of Chinese culture. Finally, the book deploys traditional Chinese thought in order to challenge various aspects of the Freudian project. Both Freudianism’s universal appeal and its cultural particularity are in full display throughout the book. At the same time, the allure of Chinese cultural and literary expressions, both in terms of their commonality with other cultures and their distinctive characteristics, are also scrutinized. This collection of essays will be welcomed by those interested in early modern and contemporary China, as well as the work and influence of Freud. It will also be of great interest to students and scholars of psychology, psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy, religion, and cultural studies more generally.]

Jin, Siyan. From Textuality to Historicity: Subjective Writing in Contemporary Chinese Literature. Tr. Isabelle Wen. HK: Chinese University Press, 2017.

[Abstract: Translated from the original French publication, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of 20th century Chinese literature and examines the relationship between Chinese literary theory and modernity. Jin Siyan surveys the work of leading writers including Zhang Ailing, Beidao, and Mu Dan. She seeks to answer some fundamental questions in the study of Chinese literary history, such as: How does contemporary Chinese literature go from historical narrative to the narrative of the I, where rhythm and epic merge into writing, and where the instinctive load of the rhythm substantiates the epic? What are the steps and the forms of mediation that allow such a transition? Is the subject the only agent of the transition? What is its status? What is the role of poetic language that led to the birth of the subject and which separates it from empiricism? What are the difficulties faced by Chinese writers today? Young Chinese writers set off in search of a totally new writing to rediscover subjectivity, which is in no way limited to literature; it also covers areas such as the law, and the expression of the I confronted with an overpowering we.]

Kahn-Ackermann, Michael. “‘How Do You Recognize Reality?’: Issues in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 63-68.

Kaminsky, Johannes D. Dreams in Chinese Fiction: Spiritism, Aestheticism, and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 2024.

[Abstract: This book considers the contemporary political formula of the “Chinese Dream” in the light of the treatment of dreams in Chinese literary history since antiquity. Sinic literary and philosophical texts document an extensive spectrum of dream possibilities: starting with Zhuangzi’s eminent butterfly dream, an early example of the inversion of the dreamer’s reality, through to confusing visions of the spiritual realm. In classical dramas, novels, and ghost stories, dreams see the earthly realm enter into conflict with higher realms of existence. They indulge the dreamer’s quest for sensual pleasures, but then spiritual beings relentlessly harvest the dreamers’ life energy. Dreams promise spiritual enlightenment – only to abandon the dreamer in a state of utter confusion. In the early twentieth century, traditional dream knowledge is abandoned in favour or Freudian episodes of sexual repression. In this context, the collective national dream emerges as an unexpected vehicle of the pained individual’s hope for national rejuvenation.]

Kelly, David. “The Chinese Search for Freedom as a Universal Value.” In D. Kelly and Anthony Reid, eds., Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and South East Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 93-120.

Kindler, Benjamin. “Maoist Miniatures: The Proletarian Everyday, Visual Remediation, and the Politics of Revolutionary Form.” Modern China 48, 5 (2022).

[Abstract: Across an extended historical arc, Chinese writers and theorists were invested in new, short literary forms that would be able to intervene in the reorganization of social relations. These forms occurred under a range of names during the twentieth century—the wall story 墙头小说, the short short story 小小说, and the microstory 微型小说—but consistently marked a series of avant-garde experiments concerned with locating an alternative to the long-form novel. This article examines this history from its emergence amid the international proletarian movement of the 1930s, through the Great Leap Forward, and on to the early reform period, and does so through the theoretical lens of the everyday 日常生活 and the relation between literary texts and visual media. It demonstrates how the deployment of these forms shifted from an attempt to remake everyday life to their assimilation to a discourse of modernization in the reform period.]

Kinkley, Jeffrey. Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Knight, Sabina. The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.

[Abstract: By examining how narrative strategies reinforce or contest deterministic paradigms, this work describes modern Chinese fiction’s unique contribution to ethical and literary debates over the possibility for meaningful moral action. How does Chinese fiction express the desire for freedom as well as fears of attendant responsibilities and abuses? How does it depict struggles for and against freedom? How do the texts allow for or deny the possibility of freedom and agency? By analyzing discourses of agency and fatalism and the ethical import of narrative structures, the author explores how representations of determinism and moral responsibility changed over the twentieth century. She links these changes to representations of time and to enduring commitments to human-heartedness and social justice. Although Chinese fiction may contain some of the most disconsolate pages in the twentieth century’s long literature of disenchantment, it also bespeaks, Knight argues, a passion for freedom and moral responsibility. Responding to ongoing conflicts between the claims of modernity and the resources of past traditions, these stories and novels are often dominated by challenges to human agency. Yet read with sensitivity to traditional Chinese conceptions of moral experience, their testimony to both the promises of freedom and the failure of such promises opens new perspectives on moral agency.]

Kubin, Wolfgang, ed. Symbols of Anguish: In Search of Melancholy in China. Bern: Peter Lang, 2001. [contains articles on Zhang Ailing, Liu E, Lu Xun, late Qing and early Republican poetry, and exile]

Kubin, W. and R. Wagner, eds. Essays in Modern Chinese Literature and Literary Criticism. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1982.

Larson, Wendy. Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer: Ambivalence and Autobiography. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

—–. From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ban Wang]

[Abstract: When Freudian sexual theory hit China in the early 20th century, it ran up against competing models of the mind from both Chinese tradition and the new revolutionary culture. Chinese theorists of the mind—both traditional intellectuals and revolutionary psychologists— steadily put forward the anti-Freud: a mind shaped not by deep interiority that must be excavated by professionals, but shaped instead by social and cultural interactions. Chinese novelists and film directors understood this focus and its relationship to Mao’s revolutionary ethos, and much of the literature of twentieth-century China reflects the spiritual qualities of the revolutionary mind. From Ah Q to Lei Feng investigates the continual clash of these contrasting models of the mind provided by Freud and revolutionary Chinese culture, and explores how writers and filmmakers negotiated with the implications of each model.]

Larson, Wendy, and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds. Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1993.

—–. “The Self Loving the Self: Men and Connoisseurship in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, eds. Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 175-97.

Laughlin, Charles, ed. Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

[Abstract: This book is a significant gathering of ideas on the subject of modern Chinese literature and culture of the past several years. The essays represent a wide spectrum of new approaches and new areas of subject matter that are changing the landscape of knowledge of modern and contemporary Chinese culture: women’s literature, theatre (performance), film, graphic arts, popular literature, as well as literature of the Chinese diaspora. These phenomena and the approaches to them manifest interconnected trajectories for new scholarship in the field: the rewriting of literary history, the emergence of visual culture, and the quotidian apocalypse – the displacement of revolutionary romanticism and realism as central paradigms for cultural expression by the perspective of private, everyday experience.]

—–. “The Revolutionary Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Kam Louie, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 218-34.

Laughlin, Charles and Liu Hongtao. “The Novella in Chinese Literature.” Chinese Literature Today 5, 2 (2016): 6-7.

Laurence, Patricia. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China. Columbia: U of South Carolina Press, 2003.

Lee, Gregory. “Contemporary Chinese Poetry and the Nobel Prize, 1990.” [a transcript of a tape-recording of a conversation between Göran Malmqvist and myself which took place on 14th May 1990 in Stockholm]

—–. Troubadors, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, Nationalism, and Hybridity in China and Its Others. London: Hurst, 1996.

—–. La Chine et le spectre de l’Occident: Contestation poétique, modernité et métissage. Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2002.

Lee, Haiyan. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.

—–. The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jonathan Stalling]

—–. A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. [MCLC Resource Center review by Paul Katz]

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “The Solitary Traveler: Images of the Self in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Robert Hegel and Richard Hessney eds., Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 1985, 282-307.

—–. “Some Notes on ‘Culture,’ ‘Humanism,’ and the ‘Humanities’ in Modern Chinese Cultural Discourses.” Surfaces 5 (1995).

Lee, Mabel and A. D. Syromkla-Stefanowska, eds. Literary Intercrossings: East Asia and the West. Sydney: Wild Peony, 1998.

Lee, Shuen-shing. Utopia, Where East and West Meet: A Comparative Study of Hybrid Utopias in Twentieth-Century Chinese and Western Literature. Ph.D. diss. Seattle: University of Washington, 1995.

Lee, Tong King. “Forbidden Imaginations: Three Chinese Narratives on Mother-Son Incest.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 36 (Dec. 2014): 1-24.

—–. Experimental Chinese Literature: Translation, Technology, Poetics. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

[Abstract: the first theoretical account of material poetics from the dual perspectives of translation and technology. Focusing on a range of works by contemporary Chinese authors including Hsia Yü, Chen Li, and Xu Bing, Tong King Lee explores how experimental writers engage their readers in multimodal reading experiences by turning translation into a method and by exploiting various technologies. The key innovation of this book rests with its conceptualisation of translation and technology as spectrums that interact in different ways to create sensuous, embodied texts. Drawing on a broad range of fields such as literary criticism, multimodal studies, and translation, Tong King Lee advances the notion of the translational text, which features transculturality and intersemioticity in its production and reception.]

Li, Kay. Bernard Shaw and China: Cross-Cultural Encounters. Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2007.

Li, Qingquan. From Critical Realism to Socialist Realism: A Historical Survey of Realism in Modern Chinese Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Li, Ruru. Shashibiya, Staging Shakespeare in China. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2003.

Lian, Xinda. “Re-dreaming the Butterfly Dream.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 3, 1 (July 1999): 103-29. [Zhuangzi’s influence on Lu Xun, A Cheng, Han Shaogong, Chen Kaige]

Link, Perry. The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

Lipman, Jonathan N. and Steven Harrell, eds. Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture. Albany: SUNY, 1990.

La Litterature chinoise contemporaine, tradition et modernité: colloque d’Aix-en-Provence, le 8 juin 1988. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Universite de Provence, 1989.

Liu, Jianmei. Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women’s Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003.

—–. Zhuangzi and Modern Chinese Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

[Abstract: This is a powerful account of how the ruin and resurrection of Zhuangzi in modern China’s literary history corresponds to the rise and fall of modern Chinese individuality. The book highlights two central philosophical themes of Zhuangzi: the absolute spiritual freedom as presented in the chapter “Free and Easy Wandering” and the rejection of absolute and fixed views on right and wrong, as seen in the chapter “On the Equality of Things.” It argues that the twentieth-century reinterpretation and appropriation of these two important philosophical themes best testifies to the dilemma and inner struggle of modern Chinese intellectuals. In the cultural environment in which Chinese writers and scholars were working, the pursuit of individual freedom as well as a more tolerant and multifaceted cultural mentality has constantly been downplayed, suppressed, or criticized. By addressing a large number of modern Chinese writers, including Guo Moruo, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Lin Yutang, Fei Ming, Liu Xiaofeng, Wang Zengqi, Han Shaogong, Ah Cheng, Yan Lianke, and Gao Xingjian, the book provides an insightful and engaging study of how they have embraced, rejected, and returned to ancient thought and how the spirit of Zhuangzi has illuminated their writing and thinking through the turbulent eras of modern China. This book not only explores modern Chinese writers’ complicated relationships with “tradition”, but also sheds light on whether the freedom of independence, nonparticipation, and roaming and the more encompassing cultural space inspired by Zhuangzi’s spirit were allowed to exist in a modern Chinese literary context.]

Liu, Kang and Tang Xiaobin, eds. Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Liu Kang. “Aesthetics and Chinese Marxism.” Positions 3, 2 (Fall 1995).

—–. Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Conemporaries. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

Liu, Tao Tao. “Exile, Homelessness and Displacement in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Wolfgang Kubin, ed., Symbols of Anguish: In Search of Melancholy in China. Bern: Peter Lang, 2001, 335-52.

—–. “Perceptions of City and Country in Republican Fiction.” In David Faure and Tao Tao Liu, eds., Town and Country in China Identity and Perception. Palgrave MacMillan, 2001.

Liu, Zaifu. Liu Zaifu: Selected Critical Essays. Eds. Howard Y. F. Choy and Jianmei Liu. Leiden: Brill, 2021.

[Abstract: Liu Zaifu 劉再復 is a name that has already been ingrained within contemporary Chinese literary history. This landmark volume presents Anglophone readers with Liu’s profound reflections on Chinese literature and culture at different times. The essays collected here demonstrate Liu’s historical experience and trajectory as an exiled Chinese intellectual who persistently safeguards the individuality and the autonomy of literature, refusing to succumb to political manipulation. Liu’s theory of literary subjectivity has opened ways for Chinese writers to thrive and innovate. His panoramic view not only unravels the intricate interplay between literature and politics but also firmly regards the transcendental value of literature as a significant ground to subvert revolutionary dogmatism and criticize Chinese modernity. Rather than drawing upon the existing paradigm, he reinvents his own unique theoretical conceptions in order to exile the borrowed “gods.”]

Lovell, Julia. The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.

[Abstract: In the 1980s China’s politicians, writers, and academics began to raise an increasingly urgent question: why had a Chinese writer never won a Nobel Prize for literature? Promoted to the level of official policy issue and national complex, Nobel anxiety generated articles, conferences, and official delegations to Sweden. Exiled writer Gao Xingjian’s win in 2000 failed to satisfactorily end the matter, and the controversy surrounding the Nobel committee’s choice has continued to simmer. This comprehensive study of China’s obsession spans the twentieth century and taps directly into the key themes of modern Chinese culture: national identity, international status, and the relationship between intellectuals and politics. The intellectual preoccupation with the Nobel literature prize expresses tensions inherent in China’s move toward a global culture after the collapse of the Confucian world-view at the start of the twentieth century, and particularly since China’s re-entry into the world economy in the post-Mao era. Attitudes toward the prize reveal the same contradictory mix of admiration, resentment, and anxiety that intellectuals and writers have long felt toward Western values as they struggled to shape a modern Chinese identity. In short, the Nobel complex reveals the pressure points in an intellectual community not entirely sure of itself. Making use of extensive original research, including interviews with leading contemporary Chinese authors and critics, The Politics of Cultural Capital is a comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of an issue that cuts to the heart of modern and contemporary Chinese thought and culture. It will be essential reading for scholars of modern Chinese literature and culture, globalization, post-colonialism, and comparative and world literature.]

Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. “When Mimosa Blossoms: The Ideology of Self in Modern Chinese Literature.” Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association 28, 3 (1993): 1-16.

Luo, Liang. The Avant-garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Rossella Ferrari]

[Abstract: explores how an important group of Chinese performing artists invested in politics and the pursuit of the avant-garde came to terms with different ways of being “popular” in modern times. In particular, playwright and activist Tian Han (1898-1968) exemplified the instability of conventional delineations between the avant-garde, popular culture, and political propaganda. Liang Luo traces Tian’s trajectory through key moments in the evolution of twentieth-century Chinese national culture, from the Christian socialist cosmopolitanism of post–WWI Tokyo to the urban modernism of Shanghai in 1920s and 30s, then into the Chinese hinterland during the late 1930s and 40s, and finally to the Communist Beijing of the 1950s, revealing the dynamic interplay of art and politics throughout this period. Understanding Tian in his time sheds light upon a new generation of contemporary Chinese avant-gardists (Ai Wei Wei being the best known), who, half a century later, are similarly engaging national politics and popular culture.]

Malmqvist, Goran, ed. Modern Chinese Literature in Its Social Context. Stockholm: Nobel Symposium, 1975.

Mangalagiri, Adhira. States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relations in the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: States of Disconnect examines the breakdown of transnationalism through readings of literary texts that express aversion to pairing ideas of China and India. Adhira Mangalagiri proposes the concept of “disconnect”: a crisis of transnationalism perceptible when a connection is severed, interrupted, or disavowed. Despite their apparent insularity, texts of disconnect offer possibilities for relating ethically across borders while resisting both narrow nationalisms and globalized habits of thought.]

Martin, Helmut. “The Future of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong: Perspectives Explored by Contemporary Chinese Writers.” In King-yuh Chang, ed., Ideology and Politics in Twentieth Century China. Taibei: Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, 1988, 174-95.

—–. “A New Proximity: Chinese Literature in the People’s Republic and on Taiwan.” In H. Goldblatt, ed., Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writings and Its Audiences. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990, 29-43.

Maruyama, Noboru. “Contemporary Chinese Literature in Japan.” Acta Asiatica 72 (1997): 1-26.

McDougall, Bonnie. “Writers and Performers, Their Works, and Their Audiences in the First Three Decades.” In McDougall, ed. Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the PRC, 1949-79. Berkeley: UCP, 1984, 269-304.

—–. “Writing Self: Author/Audience Complicity in Modern Chinese Fiction.” Archiv Orientalni 64 (1996): 245-68.

—–. “Writing Self: Author/Audience Complicity in Modern Chinese Fiction.” In McDougall, Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century. HK: Chinese University Press, 2003, 45-74.

—–. “Literary Decorum or Carnivalistic Grotesque: Literature in the People’s Republic of China after 50 years.” China Quarterly 159, 1 (Sept. 1999): 723-732. Rpt in McDougall, Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century. HK: Chinese University Press, 2003, 241-74.

—–. Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2003.

Miller, J. Hillis. “Introduction to and Discussion Summary of Wang Hui’s ‘Humanism as the Theme of Chinese Modernity.'” Surfaces 5 (1995).

Moran, Thomas, ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography–Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900-1949. NY: Thomson Gale, 2007.

Mostow, Jonathan, ed. The Columbia Commpanion to Modern East Asian Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2003. [The China section, edited by Kirk A. Denton, includes pages 285-616].

Ng, Mau-sang. The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987.

Oakes, Tim. Tourism and Modernity in China. NY: Routledge, 1998.

Peng, Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

[Abstract: The authors investigate the significant role translation plays in cultural mediation. Transnational organizations that bring about cross-cultural interactions as well as regulating authorities, in the form of both nation-states and ideologies, are under scrutiny.]

Pease, Catherine E. “Remembering the Taste of Melons: Modern Chinese Stories of Childhood.” In Anne Kinney, ed. Chinese Views of Childhood. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995, 279-320.

Prusek, Jaroslav. Chinese History and Literature. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1970.

—–. The Lyrical and the Epic. Ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

—–, ed. Studies in Modern Chinese Literature. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1964.

Riep, Steven. “A War of Wounds: Disability, Disfigurement, and Antiheroic Portrayals of the War of Resistance Against Japan.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, 1 (Spring 2008): 129-72.

Robinson, Lewis Stewart. Double-Edged Sword: Christianity and 20th Century Chinese Fiction. HK: Tao Fong Shan Ecumenical Center, 1986.

Rojas, Carlos. “Cannibalism and the Chinese Body Politic: Hermeneutics and Violence in Cross-Cultural Perception.” PMC 13, 3 (May 2002).

—–, ed. “Discourses of Disease.” Special issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, 1 (Spring 2011).

—–. “Introduction: ‘The Germ of Life.'” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, 1 (Spring 2011): 1-16.

Sang Tze-lang. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Shih, Shu-mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Song, Mingwei. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Pu Wang]

[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.]

Song, Weijie. Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, Literary Topography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

[Abstract: investigates the five methods of representing Beijing-a warped hometown, a city of snapshots and manners, an aesthetic city, an imperial capital in comparative and cross-cultural perspective, and a displaced city on the Sinophone and diasporic postmemory-by authors travelling across mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Sinophone and non-Chinese communities. The metamorphosis of Beijing’s everyday spaces and the structural transformation of private and public emotions unfold Manchu writer Lao She’s Beijing complex about a warped native city. Zhang Henshui’s popular snapshots of fleeting shocks and everlasting sorrows illustrate his affective mapping of urban transition and human manners in Republican Beijing. Female poet and architect Lin Huiyin captures an aesthetic and picturesque city vis-à-vis the political and ideological urban planning. The imagined imperial capital constructed in bilingual, transcultural, and comparative works by Lin Yutang, Princess Der Ling, and Victor Segalen highlights the pleasures and pitfalls of collecting local knowledge and presenting Orientalist and Cosmopolitan visions. In the shadow of World Wars and Cold War, a multilayered displaced Beijing appears in the Sinophone postmemory by diasporic Beijing native Liang Shiqiu, Taiwan sojourners Zhong Lihe and Lin Haiyin, and émigré martial arts novelist Jin Yong in Hong Kong. Weijie Song situates Beijing in a larger context of modern Chinese-language urban imaginations, and charts the emotional topography of the city against the backdrop of the downfall of the Manchu Empire, the rise of modern nation-state, the 1949 great divide, and the formation of Cold War and globalizing world. Drawing from literary canons to exotic narratives, from modernist poetry to chivalric fantasy, from popular culture to urban planning, Song explores the complex nexus of urban spaces, archives of emotions, and literary topography of Beijing in its long journey from imperial capital to Republican city and to socialist metropolis.]

Stuckey, G. Andrew. Old Stories Retold: Narrative and Vanishing Pasts in Modern China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.

[Abstract: Old Stories Retold explores the ways modern Chinese narratives dramatize and embody the historical sense that links them to the past and to the Chinese literary tradition. Largely guided by Walter Benjamin’s discussions of history, G. Andrew Stuckey looks at the ways Chinese narrative engages a historical process that pieces together fragments of the past into new configurations to better serve present needs. By examining intertextual connections between separate texts, Stuckey seeks to discover traces of an original, whether it be thought of as the past, history, or tradition, when it has been rewritten in modern and contemporary Chinese fiction. Old Stories Retold shows how the articulation of the past into new historical configurations disrupts accepted understandings of the past, and as such, can be intentionally pitted against modernist historical knowledge to resist the modernist ends that this knowledge is mobilized to achieve.]

Sun, Emily. On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China. NY: Fordham University Press, 2021.

[Abstract: compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided—and continues to provide—a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization. The book offers readings of a selection of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds. Sun’s book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. . .]

Sun, Lung-kee. The Chinese National Character: From Nationhood to Individuality. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001.

Sun Naixiu 孫乃修. Fuluoyide yu Zhongguo xiandai wenxue 佛洛伊德與中國現代作家 (Freud and modern Chinese literature). Taipei: Yeqiang, 1995.

Takeuchi, Yoshimi. What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi. Tr. Richard Calichman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Tam, Kwok-kan. “Self-Identity and the Problematic of Chinese Modernity.” The Humanities Bulletin 4 (1995): 57-64.

Tam, Kwok-kan and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds. Gender, Discoures and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2009.

Tang, Xiaobing. Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidien. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

Teow, See Heng. Japanese Culural Policy Toward China, 1918-1931: A Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Tian, Xiaofei. “Muffled Dialect Spoken by Green Fruit: An Alternative History of Modern Chinese Poetry.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 1 (Spring 2009).

“Theory and Practice of Translation in China.” Special issue of Meta XLIV, 1 (1999).

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, Shijun. The Dialectics of Modernization: Habermas and the Chinese Discourse of Modernization. Sydney: Wild Peony, 2000.

Tsu, Jing. Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern. Riverhead Books, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Gina Anne Tam]

[Abstract: After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao’s phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today.]

Twohey, Michael. Authority and Welfare in China: Modern Debates in Historical Perspective. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

U, Eddy. Creating the Intellectual: Chinese Communism and the Rise of a Classification. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Sebastian Veg]

Veg, Sebastian. Fictions du pouvoir chinois: Littérature, modernisme et démocratie au début du XXe siècle. Paris: Editions EHESS, 2009.

—–. “Resisting Enchantment, Questioning Aestheticism: Modern Chinese Literature and the Public Sphere.” Critical Inquiry 46, 3 (2020): 536-54.

[Abstract: If indeed aestheticization and enchantment are perennial traits of state discourses and practices in China, it is perhaps unsurprising that a countertradition in modern literature should emphasize disenchantment. Cultural productions that originate from outside the sphere of the state have often questioned its authority. Where the state seeks to enchant, literature has sometimes sought to kindle doubt, to arouse debate. Although such debates have often been curtailed or suppressed, it is worth reexamining the connections between literary production and political debates in different historical contexts throughout twentieth-century China. Drawing on theories that stress the intentionality of literature and the speech act value of the literary text, the present essay attempts to characterize the communicational dynamics both within the text and in the context of its reception. In this perspective, it revisits some of the literary debates that took place in China in the May Fourth and Republican periods (represented by Lu Xun), the early postwar years and the ROC—PRC transition (Lao She), in certain works written during the Cultural Revolution (Jin Fan/Liu Qingfeng), as well as post-1979 literature on the mainland (Yan Lianke). It does so by selecting texts that seem to have been produced with the intention of challenging the aesthetics of enchantment, using literary devices to interrupt readers’ enjoyment and thus open a space for public discussion of both aesthetics and politics.]

Walsh, Megan. The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2022.

[Abstract: The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you’ve never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by “rotten girls,” swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel-laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden-age of sci-fi. Chinese online fiction is now the largest publishing platform in the world. Fueled by her passionate engagement with the arts and ideas of China’s people, Megan Walsh, a brilliant young critic, shows us why it’s important to finally pay attention to Chinese fiction—an exuberant drama that illustrates the complex relationship between art and politics, one that is increasingly shaping the West as well. Turns out, writers write neither what their government nor foreign readers want or expect, as they work on a different wavelength to keep alive ideas and events that are censored by the propaganda machine. The Subplot vividly captures the way in which literature offers an alternative—perhaps truer—way to understanding the contradictions that make up China itself.]

Wang, Ban. “The Real Under Scrutiny: The Cutting Edge of Chinese Fantastic Narrative.” Tamkang Review 21, 2 (1990): 149-65.

—–. The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth Century China. Stanford: SUP, 1997.

—–. Narrative Perspective and Irony in Selected Chinese and American Fiction. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2002.

—–. Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.

[Abstract: This book offers a cultural history of modern China by looking at the tension between memory and history. Mainstream books on China tend to focus on the hard aspects of economics, government, politics, or international relations. This book takes a humanistic look at modern changes and examines how Chinese intellectuals and artists experienced trauma, social upheavals, and transformations. Drawing on a wide array of sources in political and aesthetic writings, literature, film, and public discourse, the author has portrayed the unique ways the Chinese imagine and portray their own historical destiny in the midst of trauma, catastrophe, and runaway globalization–Stanford UP website]

Wang, David Der-wei. Fictional Realism in Twentieth Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen. NY: Columbia UP, 1992.

—–. “Late Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction: Four Discourses.” In Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang and Michelle Yeh, eds., Contemporary Chinese Literature: Crossing the Boundaries. Special issue of Literature East and West. Austin, TX: Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, 1995, 63-88.

—–. “Crime or Punishment? On the Forensic Discourse of Modern Chinese Literature.” In Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 260-97.

—–. “Impersonating China.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles and Reviews 25 (Dec. 2003): 133-63. [on female impersonation in modern Chinese literature]

—–. The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. [MCLC Resource Center review by C. D. Alison Bailey]

[Abstract: In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until it became identifiable with history itself. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese–often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude–this book places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers modern Chinese history as a complex of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and personal articulations of bygone and ongoing events. His discussion ranges from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of hunger and starvation to the technology of crime and punishment–from Columbia UP website]

—–. The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis. NY: Columbia University Press, 2015.

[Abstract: Wang uses the lyrical to rethink the dynamics of Chinese modernity. Although the form may seem unusual for representing China’s social and political crises in the mid-twentieth century, Wang contends that national cataclysm and mass movements intensified Chinese lyricism in extraordinary ways. Wang calls attention to the form’s vigor and variety at an unlikely juncture in Chinese history and the precarious consequences it brought about: betrayal, self-abjuration, suicide, and silence. Despite their divergent backgrounds and commitments, the writers, artists, and intellectuals discussed in this book all took lyricism as a way to explore selfhood in relation to solidarity, the role of the artist in history, and the potential for poetry to illuminate crisis. They experimented with poetry, fiction, film, intellectual treatise, political manifesto, painting, calligraphy, and music. Western critics, Wang shows, also used lyricism to critique their perilous, epic time. He reads Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Cleanth Brooks, and Paul de Man, among others, to complete his portrait.The Chinese case only further intensifies the permeable nature of lyrical discourse, forcing us to reengage with the dominant role of revolution and enlightenment in shaping Chinese–and global–modernity. Wang’s remarkable survey reestablishes Chinese lyricism’s deep roots in its own native traditions, along with Western influences, and realizes the relevance of such a lyrical calling of the past century to our time.]

Wang, Gungwu, et.al, eds. Society and the Writer: Essays on Literature in Modern Asia. Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, 1981.

Wang, Hongjian. Decadence in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture: A Comparative and Literary-Historical Reevaluation. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Nan Hu]

[Abstract: European Decadence, a controversial artistic movement that flourished mainly in late-nineteenth-century France and Britain, has inspired several generations of Chinese writers and literary scholars since it was introduced to China in the early 1920s. Translated into Chinese as tuifei, which has strong hedonistic and pessimistic connotations, the concept of Decadence has proven instrumental in multiple waves of cultural rebellion, but has also become susceptible to moralistic criticism. Many contemporary scholars have sought to rehabilitate Chinese Decadence but have found it difficult to dissociate it from the negative connotations of tuifei. More importantly, few have reconnected Decadence with its steadfast pursuit of intellectual pleasure and unique paradoxes or explored the specific socio-historical conditions and cultural dynamics that gave rise to Decadence. This is the first comprehensive study of Decadence in Chinese literature since the early twentieth century. Standing at the intersection of comparative literature and cultural history, it transcends the framework of tuifei by locating European Decadence in its sociocultural context and uses it as a critical lens to examine Chinese Decadent literature and Chinese society. Its in-depth analysis reveals that some Chinese writers and literary scholars creatively appropriated the concept of Decadence for enlightenment purposes or to bid farewell to revolution. Meanwhile, the socialist system, by first fostering strong senses of elitism among certain privileged groups and then rescinding its ideological endorsement and material support, played a crucial role in the emergence of Chinese Decadent literature in the European sense.]

Wang, Hui. “Humanism as the Theme of Chinese Modernity.” Surfaces 5 (1995).

—–. Wang, Hui. “The Liberation of the Object and the Interrogation of Modernity: Rethinking The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought.” Modern China 34, 1 (Jan. 2008): 114-140. Rpt. as “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.

[Abstract: This article, a reflection on the author’s tetralogy The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, focuses on three sets of antithetical concepts—empire and nation-state, rational bureaucracy (junxian zhi) and feudal system (fengjian zhi), rites/music and institutions—”continuity and rupture” in history and the idea of the trend of the times (shishi); and the question of scientific outlook and national knowledge. It argues the importance of liberating the historical world of thought from the position as an object for our observation and transforming it into a perspective from which we can reflect on and observe the modern world of ours.]

—–. The Politics of Imagining Asia. Ed. Theodore Huters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

[Abstract: In this bold, provocative collection, Wang Hui confronts some of the major issues concerning modern China and the status quo of contemporary Chinese thought. The book’s overarching theme is the possibility of an alternative modernity that does not rely on imported conceptions of Chinese history and its legacy. Wang Hui argues that current models, based largely on Western notions of empire and the nation-state, fail to account for the richness and diversity of pre-modern Chinese historical practice. At the same time, he refrains from offering an exclusively Chinese perspective and placing China in an intellectual ghetto. Navigating terrain on regional language and politics, he draws on China’s unique past to expose the inadequacies of European-born standards for assessing modern China’s evolution. He takes issue particularly with the way in which nation-state logic has dominated politically charged concerns like Chinese language standardization and “The Tibetan Question.” His stance is critical–and often controversial–but he locates hope in the kinds of complex, multifaceted arrangements that defined China and much of Asia for centuries. The Politics of Imagining Asia challenges us not only to re-examine our theories of “Asia” but to reconsider what “Europe” means as well. As Theodore Huters writes in his introduction, “Wang Hui’s concerns extend beyond China and Asia to an ambition to rethink world history as a whole.”]

—–. The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. Ed. Michael Hill Gibbs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: What does it mean for China to be modern, or for modernity to be Chinese? How is the notion of historical rupture—a fundamental distinction between tradition and modernity—compatible or not with the history of Chinese thought? These questions animate The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, a sprawling intellectual history considered one of the most significant achievements of modern Chinese scholarship, available here in English for the first time. Wang Hui traces the seventh-century origins of three key ideas—“principle” (li), “things” (wu), and “propensity” (shi)—and analyzes their continual evolution up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Confucian scholars grappled with the problem of linking transcendental law to the material world, thought to action—a goal that Wang argues became outdated as China’s socioeconomic conditions were radically transformed during the Song Dynasty. Wang shows how the epistemic shifts of that time period produced a new intellectual framework that has proven both durable and malleable, influencing generations of philosophers and even China’s transformation from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century. In a new preface, Wang also reflects on responses to his book since its original publication in Chinese. With theoretical rigor and uncommon insight into the roots of contemporary political commitments, Wang delivers a masterpiece of scholarship that is overdue in translation. Through deep readings of key figures and classical texts, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought provides an account of Chinese philosophy and history that will transform our understanding of the modern not only in China but around the world.]

Wang, Jing. Strategies of Modern Chinese Women Writers’ Autobiographies. Ph. D. diss. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 2000.

Wang, Lingzhen. Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Wang, Mason Y.H., ed. Perspectives in Contemporary Chinese Literature. University Center, MI: Green River Press, 1983.

Wang, Ning. “Modernity and Whitman’s Reception in Chinese Literature.” In Ed Folson ed., Whitman East & West : new contexts for reading Walt Whitman. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002, 197-207.

Wang, Xiaojue. Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature Across the 1949 Divide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jeffrey Kinkley]

[Abstract: The year 1949 witnessed China divided into multiple political and cultural entities. How did this momentous shift affect Chinese literary topography? Modernity with a Cold War Face examines the competing, converging, and conflicting modes of envisioning a modern nation in mid-twentieth century Chinese literature. Bridging the 1949 divide in both literary historical periodization and political demarcation, Xiaojue Wang proposes a new framework to consider Chinese literature beyond national boundaries, as something arising out of the larger global geopolitical and cultural conflict of the Cold War. Examining a body of heretofore understudied literary and cultural production in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas during a crucial period after World War II, Wang traces how Chinese writers collected artistic fragments, blended feminist and socialist agendas, constructed ambivalent stances toward colonial modernity and an imaginary homeland, translated foreign literature to shape a new Chinese subjectivity, and revisited the classics for a new time. Reflecting historical reality in fictional terms, their work forged a path toward multiple modernities as they created alternative ways of connection, communication, and articulation to uncover and undermine Cold War dichotomous antagonism.

Wedell-Wedelsborg, Anne. “Haunted Fiction: Modern Chinese Literature and the Supernatural.” International Fiction Review 32, 1/2 (2005):

Williams, Philip F. “Chinese Cannibalism’s Literary Portrayal: From Cultural Myth to Investigative Reportage.” Tamkang Review 27, 4 (Summer 1997): 421-42.

—–. “Twentieth-Century Fiction.” In Victor H. Mair, ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2001, 732-57.

—–. “Janus-faced Popularization in 20th-century Chinese Fiction: A Critical Quandary.” Tamkang Review 31, 3 (Spring 2001): 41-64.

—–. “From Atomized to Networked: Rural to Urban Migrants in Twentieth-century Chinese Narrative.” In Philip F. Williams, ed., Asian Literary Voices: From Marginal to Mainstream. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010, 41-52.

Wu, Shengqing and Xuelei Huang, eds. Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. London: Routledge, 2022.

[Abstract: This book presents the first collection of studies of the senses and sensory experiences in China, filling a gap in sensory research while offering new approaches to Chinese Studies. Bringing together 12 chapters by literary scholars and historians, this book critically interrogates the deeply rooted meanings that the senses have coded in Chinese culture and society. Built on an exploration of the sensorium in early Chinese thought and late imperial literature, this book reveals the sensory manifestations of societal change and cultural transformation in China from the nineteenth century to the present day. It features in-depth examinations of a variety of concepts, representations, and practices, including aural and visual paradigms in ancient Chinese texts; odours in Ming-Qing literature and Republican Shanghai; the tactility of kissing and the sonic culture of community singing in the Republican era; the socialist sensorium in art, propaganda, memory, and embodied experiences; and contemporary-era multisensory cultural practices. Engaging with the exciting “sensory turn,” this original work makes a unique contribution to the world history of the senses, and will be a valuable resource to scholars and students of Chinese Literature, History, Cultural Studies, and Media.]

Wu, Yenna. “Rethinking Postcolonialist Assumptions and Portrayals of Cannibalism in Modern Chinese Fiction.” Tamkang Review 31, 3 (Spring 2001): 15-40.

Xiao, Jiwei. Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature. New York: Routledge, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Paola Iovene]

[Abstract: What is a detail? How is it different from xijie, its Chinese counterpart? Is “reading for the details” fundamentally different from “reading for the plot”? Did xijie xiaoshuo, the Chinese novel of details, give the world its earliest form of modern fiction? Inspired by studies of vision and modernity as well as cinema, this book gazes out on the larger world through the small aperture of the detail, highlighting how concrete literary minutiae become “telling” as they reveal the dynamics of seeing and hearing, the vibrations of the mind, the complexity of the everyday, and the imperative to recognize the minute, the humble, and the hidden. In a strain of masterpieces of xijie xiaoshuo, such details play a key role in pivoting the novel from didacticism towards a capacious modern form. Examining the Chinese detail as both a common idiom and a unique concept, and extrapolating it from individual works to the culture at large, reveals under-explored areas of the Chinese novel: its psychological depths, its connections with other genres and forms, its partaking in Chinese material life and capitalist modernity, as well as repressions and difficulties surrounding its reception in national and international contexts. With carefully chosen case studies, Xiao’s book not only exemplifies the value of deep reading in approaching complex works of Chinese fiction as world literature, it also throws light on the aesthetics and politics of “the unseen,” which has become central to a humanist tradition that flows across literature, cinema, and other art forms.]

Xie, Miya Qiong. 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.]

Yan, Haiping. Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948. London: Routledge, 2006.

Yang, Xiaobin. Selections from Lishi yu xiuci (History and rhetoric). Contemporary Chinese Literature, 1999. [in Chinese, browser required]

Ye, Rong. “A Summary View on Two High Tides of the Impact of Christianity on Twentieth Century Chinese Literature.” Monumenta Serica 54 (2006): 363-93.

Yeh, Man. “Establishment of a Country Through Culinary Art.” Tr. Nancy Zi Chiang. The Chinese Pen (Winter 1972): 20-22.

Yip, Terry Siu-han. “Place, Gender and Identity: The Global-Local Interplay in Three Stories from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.” In Kwok-kan Tam et al., eds., Sights of Contestation: Localism, Globalism and Cultural Production in Asia and the Pacific. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2002, 17-34. [deals with stories by Tie Ning, Zhang Xiguo (Chang Shi-kuo), and Ye Si]

Yip, Wai-lim. “Condemned to Cultural Displacement: The Case of Modern China.” In Wolfgang Kubin, ed., Symbols of Anguish: In Search of Melancholy in China. Bern: Peter Lang, 2001, 315-33.

Yue, Gang. The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Zhang, Jingyuan. Psychoanalysis in China: Literary Transformations, 1919-1949. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 1992.

Zhang, Longxi. “Literary Modernity in Perspective.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 116-33.

Zhang, Yinde. Le monde romanesque chinois au XXe siecle. Geneva: Editions Honore Champion, 2003.

Zhang, Yu. Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915-1965. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Nicolai Volland]

Zhao, Henry Y. H. (Zhao Yiheng). The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern. NY: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Zou, John Yu. “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, 1999, 133-51.

Literary Societies

Ayers, William. “The Society for Literary Studies, 1921-1930.” Papers on China 7 (Feb. 1953): 34-79.

Chen Anhu 陈安湖, ed. Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shetuan liupai shi 中国现代文学社团流派史 (The history of modern Chinese literary societies and schools). Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue, 1997.

Chen Jingzhi 陳敬之. Wenxue yanjiuhui yu Chuangzao she 文學研究會與創造社 (The Literary Research Association and the Creation Society). Taibei: Chengwen, 1980.

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.

Chuangzao she ziliao 创造社资料 (Materials on the Creation society). 2 vols. Fuzhou: Fujian renmin, 1985.

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 Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 121-27.

Daruvala, Susan. “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. “The Hu Feng Group: Genealogy of a Literary School.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 413-66.

Denton, Kirk A. and Michel Hockx, eds. Literary Societies in Republican China. [website for ongoing research project; contains project description, abstracts of essays, list of literary societies, etc]

—–. Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. [MCLC Resource Center review by John Christopher Hamm]

[Abstract: Literary Societies in Republican China provides a new and comprehensive perspective on the fascinating literary world of the most turbulent period in recent Chinese history: the Republican era of 1911-1949. Wedged between the fall of the Empire and the founding of the Communist state, the Republican period witnessed enormous social, political, and cultural changes. Traditionally the period is seen as one of transition: from the country being partially colonized and occupied to being an independent nation-state, from Confucianism to socialism, from writing in classical Chinese to writing in the everyday vernacular. Modern scholarship, however, has become suspicious of such attempts to analyze history, including cultural history, as a journey from A to B via C. Instead, attention has turned to the “thick description” of complex historical phenomena without worrying about whether or not they fit into some neat linear scheme. Inevitably, such scholarship benefits from collaboration and teamwork, from the juxtaposition of different insights and different materials in order to gain in overall breadth. Literary Societies in Republican China represents such teamwork and such breadth. The thirteen essays by eleven scholars from North America, Europe, and Asia present detailed discussions of particular literary groups active on the Republican-era literary scene. Some of these groups are familiar representatives of what used to be considered the “mainstream,” while others represent literary styles that have hitherto been considered “marginal” or that have been ignored altogether. Each of the essays in this volume looks in detail at literary societies both as producers of literary views and texts and as organizations with sometimes very complex social structures. The result is a unique blend of literary, cultural, and social history, unrivalled in any English-language scholarship on China to date.]

Estran, Jaqueline. La Revue Xinyue (1928-1933): sa Contribution à la Littérature Chinoise Moderne. Ph.D. diss. Paris: INALCO, 2000.

—–. “Un monde revé: la France dans la revue Xinyue (1928-1933).” Transtext(e)s Transcultures: Journal of Global Cultural Studies 1 (May 2006).

Fan, Fa-ti. “Nature and Nation in Chinese Political Thought: The National Essence Circle in Early Twentieth-Century China.” In Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 409-37.

Fan Quan 范泉, ed. Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shetuan liupai cidian 中国现代文学社团流派词典 (Dictionary of modern Chinese literary societies and schools). Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1993.

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.

Gimpel, Denise. “More Than Butterflies: Short Fiction in the Early Years of the Literary Journal Xiaoshuo yuebao.” In Findeison and Gassmann, eds., Autumn Floods: Essay in Honour of Marian Galik. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997, 243-60.

Godley, Michael. “Politics from History: Lei Haizong and the Zhanguo Ce Clique.” Papers in Far Eastern History 40 (Sept. 1989): 95-122.

Handbook of cultural institutions in China. Ed. Chuang, Wên-ya. Shanghai, Chinese National Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, 1934-.

Hockx, Michel. “The Literary Association (Wenxue yanjiu hui, 1920-1947) and the Literary Field of Early Republican China.” China Quarterly 153 (March 1998): 49-81.

—–. “Playing the Field: Aspects of Chinese Literary Life in the 1920s.” In Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China. Richmond: Curzon, 1999; Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 61-78.

—–. 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]

—–. “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.

—–. “Literary Communities and the Production of Literature.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 46-54.

Hon, Tze-ki. “From Babbitt to ‘Bai Bide’: Interpretations of New Humanism in Xueheng.” In Kai-wing Chow, Tze-ki Hon, Hung-yok Ip, and Don Price, eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.

Hunter, Neale. The League of Left-Wing Writers, Shanghai, 1930-1936. Ph.d. diss. Canberra: Australian National University, 1973.

Ito Toramaru 伊藤虎丸. Sozosha shiryo [Chuangzao she ziliao 创造社资料] (Creation Society research materials). 2 vols. Tokyo: Ajia Shuppan, 1979.

Jia Zhifang 贾植芳, ed. Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shetuan liupai 中国现代文学社团流派 (Societies and schools in modern Chinese literature). 2 vols. Jiangsu jiaoyu, 1989. [very useful description of the many literary societies and groups in modern China]

Jia Zhifang贾植芳 et al. eds., Wenxue yanjiu hui ziliao 文学研究会资料 (Literary Association research materials). 3 vols. Zhengzhou: Henan renmin, 1985.

Jiang Bian 江边. Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue liupai 二十世纪中国文学流派 (Twentieth-century Chinese literary schools). Qingdao: Qingdao, 1993.

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. The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature: The Creation Society’s Reinvention of the Japanese Shishosetsu. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Kindler, Benjamin. “Labor Romanticism against Modernity: The Creation Society as Socialist Avant-Garde.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 2 (Fall 2020), 43-99.

Lap, Lam. “Diversity in the Ci Society: Oushe in Republican China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12, 3 (2018): 351-87.

[Abstract: A revival of ci writing was witnessed in the Qing dynasty. Emerging with this resurgence was the founding of scores of ci societies. After the fall of the Qing, some loyalists and traditional literati, following the examples of their predecessors, joined together to form a number of ci societies in Republican China. For loyalist-lyricists such as Zhu Zumou, ci writing was not just one of the effective ways to convey their memories of the past. It also meant to be a gesture of practicing and preserving traditional Chinese culture. However, due to ideological bias, their works and the vitality of cishe did not receive sufficient attention from literary historians in the past. This paper attempts to reveal and examine the interesting features of cishe in the Republican era, asserting that within the collective voice of and harmonious correspondence among the traditional lyricists, there were always some dissonances occurred. First I delineate a general picture of ci societies in Republican China, explicating the geographical distribution and social networks of ci lyricists and why lyricists from the Qing loyalist faction can associate with members of the anti-Manchu Southern Society (Nanshe), and what this phenomenon means to us. Then I focus on the Foam Society (Oushe), the ci society formed in Shanghai before the Japanese occupation of the city, and its group ci composition. Besides recounting Oushe members’ backgrounds and the details of their “refined gatherings,” I will bring into light the multifaceted thematic and stylistic features displayed in the members’ works.]

Laughlin, Charles. “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 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. “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.

Lin, Hsiang-lin. “Lyricism, the Veneration of Feeling, and Narrative Technique in the Poetry Talks of the Southern Society.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12, 2 (2018): 324-50.

[Abstract: This paper examines the voluminous “poetry talks” (shihua) written by Southern Society (Nanshe) members and focuses on two tendencies in these discourses: The general cult of sentimentality and the narrative strategy on women’s poetry. These poetic discourses succeeded the language of traditional literary criticism, but also exhibited ideals of the new epoch. As a rebellion to the Qing imperial standard on measured and learned poetry, Southern Society poets took instead as their role models eccentric and iconoclastic poets who “venerated feelings.” The cult of sentimentality continued the trend of individual liberation from the late Ming and further showed a collective discourse that promoted a new kind of revolutionary subjectivity. These authors were also fond of collecting sentimental stories about female poets. More than being traditional “talented women,” these poets exhibited a diversity of female roles in an era of liberation.]

Liu, Jinyu. “Translating and Rewriting Western Classics in China (1920s-1930s): The Case of the Xueheng Journal.” In Almut-Barbara Renger and Xin Fan, eds., Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 91-111.

Miao, Junjie. “A Preliminary Study of Literary Schools in the New Era.” Chinese Literature (Winter 1988): 174-85.

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.

Rao Hongjing et al. eds., Chuangzao she ziliao 创造社资料 (Creation Society research materials). 2 vols. Fuzhou: Fujian renmin, 1985.

Ruan, Meihui. “Li and Modernism: The Development of a Poetry Journal.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 153-77.

Schirach, Richard von. Hsu Chih-mo und die Hsin-Yueh Gesellschaft: ein Beitrag zur neuen Literatur Chinas. Munich: Thesis, 1971.

Shi Jianwei 施建伟. Zhongguo xiandai wenxue liupai lun 中国现代文学流派论 (On modern Chinese literary schools). Xi’an: Shanxi renmin, 1986.

Sun, Zhimei. “From Poetic Revolution to the Southern Society: The Birth of Classicist Poetry in Modern China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12, 2 (2018): 299-323.

[Abstract: This paper examines the birth of classicist poetry by paying attention to the Southern Society’s (Nanshe) diachronic succession of the late Qing Poetic Revolution. It provides a careful analysis on the novelty of Huang Zunxian’s poetry and shows how the Southern Society transformed Huang’s Europeanized innovation into something that was rooted in both traditional scholarship and modern political discourse. I argue that the poetry of the Southern Society as being more formally conservative than Huang’s; however, spiritually, it represents a kind of progress as it styled itself as the “poetry of the cotton-clothed” (buyi zhi shi)—the “cotton- clothed” stands for the scholars not serving in court. In this regard, its poetry could be seen as modern in spirit. It selectively integrated the traditional and the Western, for pragmatic and utilitarian purposes.]

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.

Tung, Constantine. The Search for Order and Form: The Crescent Moon Society and the Literary Movement of Modern China, 1928- 1933. Claremont, Calif., Ph.D. diss., 1971.

—–. The Crescent Moon Society: the Minority’s Challenge in the Literary Movement of Modern China. Buffalo: Council on International Studies, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1972.

Woei, Ong Chang. “‘Which West Are You Talking About?’ Critical Review: A Unique Model of Conservatism in Modern China.” Humanitas 17, 1–2 (2004): 69–82.

Wong, Lawrence Wang-chi. Politics and Literature in Shanghai: the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930-1936. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.

—–. “A Literary Organization with a Clear Political Agenda: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930-1936.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 15-46.

Wu, Shengqing. “Contested Fengya: Classical-Style Poetry Clubs in Early Republican China.” In Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies in Republican China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 15-46.

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 严家炎. Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo shi liupai 中国现代小说史流派 (History of the schools of modern Chinese fiction). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1989.

Yang Tianshi 杨天石. Nanshe shi changbian 南社史长编 (The long history of the Southern Society). Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue, 1995.

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.]

Yue Daiyun 岳戴雲. “Shijie wenhua duihua zhong de Zhongguo xiandai baoshouzhuyi.” 世界文化對話中的中國現代保守主義 (Chinese modern conservatism in world cultural dialogue). Zhongguo Wenhua 中國文化 (Chinese Culture), no. 1 (1989): 132–36.

—–. “Changming guocui, ronghua xinzhi: Tang Yongtong yu Xueheng zazhi” 昌明國粹，融化新知——湯用彤與《學衡》雜誌 (Make national essence flourish, blend in new knowledge: Tang Yongtong and the Critical Review journal). In Tang Yijie 湯一介, ed., Guogu xinzhi: Zhongguo chuantong wenhua de zaiquanshi 國故新知: 中國傳統文化的再詮釋 (National culture and new knowledge: reinterpretations of Chinese traditional culture). Beijing : Beijing saxue, 1993, 30-36.

—–. “Shijie wenhua yujing zhong de xueheng pai.” 世界文化語境中的学衡派 (The Critical Review group in the context of world culture). Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan 中國現代文學研究叢刊 no. 3 (2005): 164–77.

Zhang, Zhizhong. “On Literary Schools in China Today.” Social Sciences in China 1 (1987): 141-68.

Zhongguo wenxue yishu shetuan liupai cidian 中国文学艺术社团流派词典 (Dictionary of Chinese literary and art societies and schools). Jilin: Jilin renmin, 1992. [includes societies in pre-modern, modern and contemporary periods]

Zhu, Yanhong. “Dramatic Synthesis: Time, Memory, and History in the Writings of the Nine Leaves Poets.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 57-81.

Zuolian cidian 左联词典 (A dictionary of the League of Left-wing Writers). Ed. Yao Xin. Beijing: Guangming ribao, 1994.

Print Culture

This section has been moved to Media

Modernism/Neo-Sensationism

Admussen, Nick. “1945, August 1: Ideologies of Sound in Chinese Modernity Poetry.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 512-16.

Au, Chung-to. Modernist Aesthetics in Taiwanese Poetry since the 1950s. Leiden: Brill, 2008.

[Abstract: Much of the previous scholarship on Taiwanese modernist poetry easily falls into ideological arguments. This book participates in the development of an alternative approach to understanding Taiwanese modernist poetry. Au’s approach emphasizes the diversity and intensity of experiences of place and placelessness in the work of five poets: Lomen, Luo Fu, Rong Zi, Yu Guangzhong and Zheng Chouyu. The phenomenon of placelessness is a problem in all modernity and so modern aesthetics is an outgrowth of modern society’s sense of placelessness. This book not only shows how place becomes placelessness but also analyses Taiwanese modernist poets’ responses to the phenomenon of placelessness. Four kinds of places are examined, namely, the house, the city, homeland and an imagined literary community, in this work. The result is both refreshing and original.]

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’.]

Chan, Leo Tak-Hung. “First Imitate, then Translate: Histories of the Introduction of Stream-of-Consciousness Fiction to China.” Meta 49, 3 (Sept. 2004).

Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne. Modernism and Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

—–. “Elements of Modernism in Fiction from Taiwan.” Tamkang Review 19, 1-4 (Autumn 1988-Summer 1989): 591-606.

—–. “Modern Taiwanese Fiction from Taiwan.” In Murray Rubinstein, ed. Taiwan: A History, 1600-1994. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.

—–. “Modernism and Contemporary Fiction of Taiwan.” In Roger Bauer, Douwe Fokkema, eds., Proceedings of the XIIth Conference of the Inernational Comparative Literature Association: Space and Boundaries of Literature. Munich: Iudicium, 1990, 285-90.

Chen, Xiaomei. “Misunderstanding Western Modernism: The Menglong Movement in Post-Mao China.” Representations 35 (Summer 1991): 143-63. Rpt. in Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China. NY: Oxford UP, 1995, 69-98.

Chiu, Kuei-fen. “Treacherous Translation: Taiwanese Tactics of Intervention in Transnational Cultural Flows.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 31, 1 (Jan. 2005): 47-69.

Fruhauf, Heiner. “Urban Exoticism and Its Sino-Japanese Scenery, 1910s-1923.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 6, 2 (1997): 117-25.

Hagenaar, Elly. “Traces of Ulysees in Chinese Fiction of the Early 1930s.” In Words from the West: Western Texts in Chinese Literary Context. Leiden: Centre of Non-Western Studies, 1993.

—–. Stream of Consciousness and Free Indirect Discourse in Modern Chinese Literature. Leiden: CNWS, 1992.

He, Li. “Modernism and China: A Summary from the People’s Daily.” Tr. Geremie Barme. Renditions 19/20 (1983): 44-54.

Hsiao, Li-chun. The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2022.

[Abstract: [The author] argues that what appeared to be a “genesis” of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the “splendid isolation” within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which “Free China” lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets’ were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of “pure literature” and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists’ expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan’s modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism’s mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War.]

Huang, Guiyou. Whitmanism, Imagism, and Modernism in China and America. Selingsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna UP; London; Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997.

Huot, Claire. “Literary Experiments: Six Files.” In Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, 7-48. [deals mostly with avant-garde writers]

Ko, Ch’ing-ming. “Modernism and Its Discontents: Taiwan Literature in the 1960s.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 76-95.

Ku, Tim-hung. “Modernism in Modern Poetry of Taiwan, ROC: A Comparative Perspective.” Tamkang Review 18 (1987/88): 125-39.

Kwan-Terry, John. “Modernism and Tradition in Some Recent Chinese Verse.” Tamkang Review 3, 2 (1972): 189-202.

Jenner, W. J. F. “Is a Modern Chinese Literature Possible?” In W. Kubin and R. Wagner, eds. Essays in Modern Chinese Literature and Literary Criticism. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1982.

Larson, Wendy, and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds. Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1993.

Larson, Wendy. “Realism, Modernism and the Spiritual Pollution Campaign.” Modern China 15, 1 (1989): 37-71.

—–. “Literary Modernism and Nationalism in Post-Mao China.” In Larson and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds. Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1993, 172-97.

—–. “Notes on the Chinese Modernism-Realism Debates.” Chinoperl Papers 20-22 (1997-99): 245-68.

Lee, Gregory. “Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Exile and the Potential for Modernism.” In Gregory Lee, ed., Chinese Writing and Exile. Chicago: Center for East Asian Studies, The University of Chicago, 1993, 55-78.

—-. “Exile and the Potential of Modernism.” [From Troubadors, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, Nationalism, and Hybridity in China and Its Others. (London: Hurst, 1996)]. Interpoetics: Poetry of Asia and the Pacific Rim 1, 2 (Spring 1998).

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “Modernsim and Romanticism in Taiwan Literature.” In Faurot, ed., Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

—–. “In Search of Modernity: Some Reflections on a New Mode of Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Chinese History and Literature.” In Cohen and Goldman, eds. Ideas Across Cultures. Cambridge: HUP, 1990, 109-136.

—– “Modernism in Modern Chinese Literature: A Study (Somewhat Comparative) in Literary History.” Tamkang Review 10, 3/4 (Spring 1980): 281-307.

—–. “Beyond Realism: Thoughts on Modernist Experiments in Contemporary Chinese Writing.” In Goldblatt, ed., Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1990, 64-77.

Leung, Ping-kwan. Aesthetics of Opposition: A Study of the Modernist Generation of Chinese Poets, 1936-1949. Ph.d. diss. San Diego: University of California, SD, 1984.

Lo, Kwai-cheung. “Writing the Otherness of Nature: Chinese Misty Poetry and the Alternative Modernist Practice.” Tamkang Review 29, 2 (1998): 87-117.

Lu, Sheldon H. “Universality/Difference: The Discourses of Chinese Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postcoloniality.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communications 9, 1-2 (1998).

Lupke, Christopher. “The Taiwan Modernists.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 481-87.

—–. “Cold War Fiction from Taiwan and the Modernists.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 250-57.

—–. “1966, October 10: Modernism versus Nativism in 1960s Taiwan.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 669-74.

Macdonald, Sean. “‘Modernism’ in Modern Chinese Literature: The ‘Third Type of Person’ as a Figure of Autonomy.” The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (June/Sept. 2002): 289-315.

[Abstract: This paper is a discussion of the New Sensation School (Xin ganjuepai), a group of authors that included Liu Na’ou, Mu Shiying, Shi Zhecun, Ye Lingfeng, and Du Heng, and who were active in Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s. In 1933, Du Heng, writing as Su Wen, edited an anthology of essays based on the Debate on Literary and Artistic Freedom that took place within the Left League. This debate, especially arguments surrounding the so called “third type of person” (disanzhong ren), is read within the context of the historical theory of aesthetic autonomy and the recent reappearance of the term “modernism” in modern Chinese literature. The “third type of person” debate is rarely discussed in detail, if it is discussed at all, despite its historical and cultural significance. Indeed, it is suggested that this debate represented an important discussion of ideas that were in the air in 1930s Shanghai, and a very significant theoretical parallel to the emergence of New Sensationist and early modernist fiction in China–from the author]

—–. “Montage as Chinese: Modernism, the Avant-garde, and the Strange Appropriation of China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, 2 (Fall 2007): 151-99.

Mak, Anthony Wan-hoi. The School of New Sensibilities in the 1930s: A Study of Liu Na’ou and Mu Shiying’s Fiction. Ph.D. diss. University of Toronto, 1995.

Malmqvist, Goran. “On the Emergence of Modernistic Poetry in China.” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 55 (1983): 57-71.

“Modernisms’ Chinas.” Special issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. Guest Editor Eric Hayot. 18,1 (Spring 2006).

Peng, Hsiao-yen. “The Poetics and Politics of New-Sensationism.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 462-67.

Pollard, David. “The Controversy over Modernism, 1979-1984.” China Quarterly 104 (1985): 641-56.

Qian, Zhaoming. Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

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 Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 176-82.

Rosenmeier, Christopher. 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.]

Shih, Shu-mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Tang, Xiaobing. “Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ and a Chinese Modernism.” PMLA 107, 5 (1992): 1222-34.

—–. “Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.” Modern Chinese Literature 7, 1 (1993): 7-32.

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.

Trappl, Richard. “‘Modernism’ and Foreign Influences on Chinese Poetry: Exemplified by the Early Guo Moruo and Gu Cheng.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 83-92.

Trumbull, Randolph. The Shanghai Modernists. Phd. diss. Stanford University, 1989.

Wang, Rujie. “The Mosaic of Chinese Modernism in Fiction and Film: The Aesthetics of Primitivism, Taoism, and Buddhism.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 35, 1-2 (March-June 2008): 14-39.

Wang, Tiao and Ronald Schleifer. Modernist Poetics in China: Consumerist Economics and Chinese Literary Modernism. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022. [Has chapters on Shi Zhi / Guo Lusheng, Han Dong, Qian Zhongshu, Mang Ke, and Mo Yan.]

Wang, Yiyan. “Venturing into Shanghai: The Flâneur in Two of Shi Zhecun’s Short Stories.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, 2 (Fall 2007): 34-70.

Xu, Jingya. “A Volant Tribe of Bards: A Critique of the Modernist Tendencies of Chinese Poetry.” Tr. Ng Mau-sang. Renditions 19/20 (1983): 59-68.

Yip, Wai-lim. “1955: Hong Kong Modernism and I.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 597-601.

Zhang, Chunjie, ed. Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe. Routledge, 2018.

[Abstract: Global modernisms are marked by tremendous transformations in lifestyle, historical consciousness, cultural values, ethics, wars, and crises. This book emphasizes modernist connections within literature, culture, history, and media beyond the nation state and the bifurcation between East and West. Instead of deconstructing and separating, Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe composes and forges new combinations, linkages, and translations that place Chinese and European modernisms on an equal footing. This book features contributions on James Joyce, Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anna Seghers, Qian Zhongshu, Weimar labor modernism, Chinese wartime literature, Chinese movies in divided Germany, and Sinophone modernity among other subjects.]

Zhang, Jingyuan. Psychoanalysis in China: Literary Transformations, 1919-1949. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 1992.

Zhang, Yingjin. “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.

Zhang, Zao. “Developments and Continuity of Modernism in Chinese Poetry Since 1917.” In Wendy Larson and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds., Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus University, 1993

Zhu, Yanhong. Reconfiguring Chinese Modernism: The Poetics of Temporality in 1940s Fiction and Poetry. Ph. D. diss. Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 2009.

[Authors that are discussed in the dissertation include: Shen Congwen, Feng Zhi, Nine Leaves Poets (primarily Yuan Kejia and Mu Dan)].

Postmodernism/Avant-Garde

Arac, Jonathan. “Postmodernism and Postmodernity in China: An Agenda for Inquiry.” New Literary History 28, 1 (1997): 135-46.

—–. “Chinese Postmodernism in Global Contexts.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997).

Cai, Rong. “The Mirror in the Text: Borges and Metafiction on Post-Mao China.” Tamkang Review 32, 2 (Winter 2001): 35-68.

—–. The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004.

Cai, Yongchun and Herbert J. Batt. “In the Labyrinth: An Introduction to Postmodern Chinese Fiction.” Manoa 15, 2 (2003): 49-56.

—–. Postmodernism and Contemporary Chinese Avant-garde Fiction. NY: Routledge, 2015.

[Abstract:This book examines the work of a group of young avant-garde fiction writers who made their rebellious appearance on the Chinese literary scene from the mid-1980s onwards. Exhibiting strategies of anti-mainstream, anti-paradigmatic discourse these writers debunked the traditional literary conventions of a hitherto very closed Chinese society using literary modes such as metafiction, narrative strategy and postmodernist language. This book will help its readers to understand why the Chinese avant garde were so closely related to Chinese politics, and how they played a role in bringing social and cultural change in China. With this in mind the book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese and comparative literature as well as those interested in Chinese society more widely.]

Castelli, Alberto. “The Disenchantment of History and the Tragic Consciousness of Chinese Postmodernity.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 21, 4 (2019).

[Abstract: Magic Realism brings fantastic events into the frame of the narration. Yet it cannot quite be defined. At the very start of the process of definition, there is a question: Magic Realism is a mode of narration, or rather a post-colonial movement rising sociological issues alternative to the logic of power? The paper parallels and juxtaposes Latin American Magic Realism and the literary experience of Chinese literary Avant-garde in the 80s, similar apocalyptic thematic, but different narrative structures. Relating to the fictional universe of Can Xue and Yu Hua, the aim is to illuminate an exclusive mode to narrate history: far from being a negotiation of identities in a post-Weberian age, Chinese Avant-garde represents the implosion of Maoist discourse, thus the magic of realism is substituted with the horrifying abyss of a haunted fiction.]

Chen, Maiping. “On the Absence of Self: From Modernism to Postmodernism.” In Larson, Wendy, and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds. Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1993, 78-90.

Chen, Wei. “Only Responsible to Their Art: Heilan and the Chinese Avant-Garde.” Tr. Tu Qiang. The White Review (Feb. 2014).

Chen, Xiaoming. “The Mysterious Other: Postpolitics in the Narrative of Chinese Film.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997). Rpt. in Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 222-38.

Chow, Rey. “Can One Say No to China?” New Literary History 28, 1 (1997): 147-51.

Dai, Jinhua. “Imagined Nostalgia.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997). Rpt. in Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 205-220.

—–. “Immediacy, Parody, and Image in the Mirror: Is There a Postmodern Scene in Beijing?” Tr. Jing M. Wang. In Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, ed., Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003, 151-66.

Ding, Ersu. “Philosophical Discourse of Postmodernity in the Chinese Context.” New Literary History 28, 1 (1997): 21-30.

Dirlik, Arif and Zhang Xudong, eds. Postmodernism and China [a special issue of Boundary 2]. 1997. Rpt. as Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

—–. “Introduction: Postmodernism and China.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997). In Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 1-17.

Flieger, Jerry Aline. “Postmodern Perspective: The Paranoid Eye.” New Literary History 28, 1 (1997): 87-110.

Fokkema, Douwe. “Chinese Postmodernist Fiction.” Modern Language Quarterly 69, 1 (2008): 141-65.

[Abstract: The title of this essay implies that there is a Chinese postmodernism that differs from American or European postmodernism. But the different postmodernisms also have a common basis, which can be found at the level of unstable signification. First the author briefly sketches how the concept of postmodernism traveled from the United States to western Europe and Russia, with key roles for American critics such as John Barth, Leslie Fiedler, Ihab Hassan, and Matei Calinescu and, in Europe, writers such as Umberto Eco and the reception of Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. To the author, Chinese postmodernism differs from other variants of postmodernism because of its different cultural-historical and literary-historical background. With few exceptions, modernism was a late discovery in China. After 1978 Wang Meng, Zhang Jie, Wang Anyi, and others wrote fiction in a modernist style. The simultaneity of modernism and postmodernism is a clue to the interpretation of Chinese fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. Postmodernist exuberant fabulation, partly inspired by Gabriel García Márquez and partly by traditional Chinese fiction, can be found in fiction by Mo Yan, Yu Hua, and Han Shaogong.Please Don’t Call Me Human (Qianwan bie ba wo dang ren, 1989), by Wang Shuo, who was recently honored with a Chinese compilation of “research material concerning Wang Shuo” (Tianjin, 2005), is also discussed.]

He, Guimei. “Genealogy and Ideology of the Avant-Garde Fiction.” In Xueping Zhong and Ban Wang, eds. Debating the Socialist Legacy and Capitalist Globalization in China. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014, 123-36.

Jian, Guo. “Resisting Modernity in Contemporary China: The Cultural Revolution and Post-Modernism.” Modern China 25, 3 (July 1999): 343-76.

Jones, Andrew F. “Avante-Garde Fiction in China.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 554-60. Rpt as “Avant-Garde Fiction in Post-Mao China.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 313-19.

King, Anthony D. and Abidin Kusno. “On Be(ij)ing in the World. ‘Postmodernism,’ ‘Globalization,’ and the Making of Transnational Space in China.” In Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 41-67.

Knight, Sabina. “Defiance and Fatalism in Roots-Seeking and Avant-Garde Fiction.” In The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006, 191-221.

Kubin, Wolfgang. “The End of the Prophet: Chinese Poetry Between Modernity and Postmodernity.” In Larson, Wendy, and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds. Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1993, 19-37.

Larson, Wendy, and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds. Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1993.

Larson, Wendy. “Women and the Discourse of Desire in Postrevolutionary China: The Awkward Postmodernism of Chen Ran.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997).

Lee, Tong King. Experimental Chinese Literature: Translation, Technology, Poetics. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Liao, Chaoyang. “Borrowed Modernity: History and the Subject in A Borrowed Life.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997). Rpt. in Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 275-93.

Liao, Ping-hui. “Postmodern Literary Discourse and Contemporary Public Culture in Taiwan.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997). Rpt. in Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 68-88.

Liu, Fusheng. “Mythification of the Reform-Era History: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the Avant-Garde Literature.” In Xueping Zhong and Ban Wang, eds. Debating the Socialist Legacy and Capitalist Globalization in China. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014, 109-22.

Liu, Kang. “Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997). Rpt. in Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 123-44.

—–. “Postmodernism, the Avant-garde, and Chinese Cultural Reflection.” The Proceedings of the ICLA ’91 Tokyo Congrees. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1992, 236-43.

—–. “Is There an Alternative to (Capitalist) Globalization?: The Debate About Modernity in China.” In Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999.

—–. “Is There An Alternative to (Capitalist) Globalization? The Debate about Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postcoloniality.” In Liu, Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004, 23-45.

Lu, Sheldon H. “Universality/Difference: The Discourses of Chinese Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postcoloniality.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communications 9, 1-2 (1998).

—–. “Global POSTmoderniZATION: The Intellectual, the Artist, and China’s Condition.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997). Rpt. in Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 145-74.

Mazzilli, Mary. “Theoretical Studies of China: Comparative Literature, the Debate on Postmodernism in China, and the Quest for a ‘Transnational’ Intellectual.” Korea Journal of Chinese Language and Literature 1 (2011): 249-72.

McDougall, Bonnie. “The Anxiety of Out-fluence: Creativity, History and Postmodernism.” In Larson and Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds., Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1993, 99-112. Rpt in McDougall, Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century. HK: Chinese University Press, 2003, 241-74.

Saussy, Haun. “Postmodernism in China: A Sketch and Some Queries.” Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Cross-Cultural Readings of Chineseness: Narratives, Images, and Interpretations of the 1990s. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 2000, 128-58.

Tang, Xiaobing. “Melancholy against the Grain: Approaching Postmodernity in Wang Anyi’s Tales of Sorrow.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997).

—–. “The Function of New Theory: What Does It Mean to Talk About Postmodernism in China?” In X. Tang and L. Kang, eds. Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique. Durham: Duke UP, 1993, 278-99.

Wang Fengzhen. “Third-World Writers in the Era of Postmodernism.” New Literary History 28, 1 (1997): 45-56.

Wang, Mingxian. “Notes on Architecture and Postmodernism in China.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997).

Wang, Ning. “Constructing Postmodernism: The Chinese Case and Its Different Versions.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 20, 1-2 (March-June 1993): 49-61.

—–. “The Mapping of Chinese Postmodernity.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997). Rpt. in Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 21-40.

—–. “Post-New Period: A Metamorphosed Version of Chinese Postmodernity.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 27, 3 (March-June 2000): 480-97.

Xu, Ben. “Postmodern-Postcolonial Criticism and Pro-Democracy Enlightenment.” Modern China 27, 1 (Jan. 2001): 17-147.

Yang, Xiaobin. “Answering the Question: What is Chinese Postmodernism/Post-Mao-Dengism?” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 1193-215.

—–. “Whence and Whither the Postmodern/Post-Mao-Deng Historical Subjectivity and Literary Subjectivity in Modern China.” In Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 379-98.

—–. The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-garde Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. [MCLC Resource Center review by Wendy Larson]

—–. “Toward a Theory of Postmodern/Post-Mao-Deng Literature.” In Charles Laughlin, ed., Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 81-97.

Yeh, Michelle. “Chinese Postmodernism and the Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Poetry.” Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Cross-Cultural Readings of Chineseness: Narratives, Images, and Interpretations of the 1990s. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 2000, 100-27.

Yu, Zhansui. Chinese Avant-garde Fiction: Quest for Historicity and Transcendent Truth. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2017.

[Abstract: Chinese avant-garde fiction undoubtedly represents a summit in contemporary Chinese literature. Given the remarkable achievement of the genre and its revolutionary and profound impact on Chinese literature, it has attracted much attention from the English-speaking academic world. The existent scholarship on this subject, however, has some gaps which need to be filled. There are few book-length studies which provide a concentrated and in-depth analysis of Chinese avant-garde fiction as a literary genre; most studies tend to treat Chinese avant-garde fiction as a component of some grand cultural trends in the contemporary Chinese intellectual world. Such a sweeping historical approach overlooks the aesthetic and epistemological values of the fiction, preventing the researchers from investigating the thematic complexity and diversity and the artistic originality and appeal of the fiction. This book examines the works of three leading writers—Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei—and their significant contributions to the genre; this is the first in-depth, comparative study on these writers. This book examines how Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei manipulate dark moods and what Karl Jaspers termed “limit-situations” such as death and suffering, along with other motifs, to pursue both historicity and transcendent truth in their fiction. Setting the fiction against the backdrop of long history of Chinese culture and the development of modern Chinese literature, the book also explores the changing intellectual and literary landscape and the changing paradigms of literature in modern China.]

Zhang, Benzi. “Paradox of Chinese Boxes: Textual Heterarchy in Postermodern Fiction.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 20, 1-2 (March-June 1993): 89-103.

Zhang, Xudong. “Epilogue: Postmodernism and Postsocialist Society–Historicizing the Present.” In Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 399-442.

Zhang, Xuejun. “Borges and Contemporary Chinese Avant-garde Writings.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 1, 2 (May 2007): 272-86.

Zhang, Yiwu. “Postmodernism and Chinese Novels of the Nineties.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997). Rpt. in Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 325-36.

Zhao Y.H. Henry (Zhao Yiheng). “Post-Isms and Chinese New Conservatism.” New Literary History 28, 1 (1997): 31-44.

Gender, Women’s Literature, Sexuality

Anagnost, Ann. “Transformation of Gender in Modern China.” In Sandra Morgen, ed., Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Reserarch and Teaching. American Anthropological Association, 1989, 313-29.

Andrews, Julia F. and Kuiyi Shen. “The New Chinese Woman and Lifestyle Magazines in the Late 1990s.” In Perry Link, Richard P. Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, 137-62.

Bailey, Paul J. Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

[Abstract: Bailey provides the first analytical study in English of Chinese women’s experiences during China’s turbulent twentieth century. Incorporating the very latest specialized research, and drawing upon Chinese cinema and autobiographical memoirs, this fascinating narrative account: (1) explores the impact of political, social and cultural change on women’s lives, and how Chinese women responded to such developments; (2) charts the evolution of gender discourses during this period; (3) illuminates both change and continuity in gender discourse and practice.]

Bao Jialin 鲍家麟. Zhongguo funnu shi lunji 中國婦女史論集 (Collection of essay on the history of Chinese women). 3 vols. Taibei: Daoxiang, 1988.

Barlow, Tani, ed. Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Barlow, Tani. “Theorizing Woman: Funu, Guojia, Jiating [Chinese Women, Chinese State, Chinese Family].” Genders 10 (1991): 132-60.

—–. “Woman at the Close of the Maoist Era in the Polemics of Li Xiaojing and Her Associates.” In Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds. The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, 506-43.

—–. “Spheres of Debt and Feminist Ghosts in Area Studies of Women in China.” Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation 1 (2001): 195-226.

—–. The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. [MCLC Resource Center review by Megan M. Ferry]

—–. “Wanting Some: Commodity Desire and the Eugenic Modern Girl.” In Mechthild Leutner and Nicola Spakowski, eds., Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective. Munster: Lit, 2005, 312-50.

—–. In the Event of Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

[Abstract: In the Event of Women outlines the stakes of what Tani Barlow calls “the event of women.” Focusing on the era of the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century’s Cultural Revolution, Barlow shows that an event is a politically inspired action to install a newly discovered truth, in this case the mammal origins of human social evolution. Highbrow and lowbrow social theory circulating in Chinese urban print media placed humanity’s origin story in relation to commercial capital’s modern advertising industry and the conclusion that women’s liberation involved selling, buying, and advertising industrial commodities. The political struggle over how the truth of women in China would be performed and understood, Barlow shows, means in part that an event of women was likely global because its truth is vested in biology and physiology. In so doing, she reveals the ways in which historical universals are effected in places where truth claims are not usually sought. This book reconsiders Alain Badiou’s concept of the event; particularly the question of whose political moment marks newly discovered truths.]

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.]

Beahan, Charlotte L. “Feminism and Nationalism in the Chinese Women’s Press, 1902-1911.” Modern China 1, 4 (Oct. 1975): 379-416.

—–. “In the Public Eye: Women in Early Twentieth Century China.” In Women in China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship. NY: Philo, 1981.

Borthwick, Sally. “Changing Concepts of the Role of Women from the Late Qing to the May Fourth Period.” In David Pong and Edmund S.K. Fung, eds., Ideal and Reality: Social and Political Change in Modern China, 1860-1949. NY: University Press of America, 1985, 63-91.

Brownell, Susan and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, eds. Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Chan, Mimi. “Women in Hong Kong Fiction Written in English: The Mixed Liaison.” Renditions 29/30 (Spring/Autumn 1988): 257-74.

Chan, Shelley W. “Sex for Sex’s Sake? The ‘Genital Writings’ of the Chinese Bad-Girl Writers.” In Philip F. Williams, ed., Asian Literary Voices: From Marginal to Mainstream. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010, 53-62.

Chen, Peng-hisang and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Amsterdam,: Rodopi, 2002, 199-210.

Chen, Xiaomei. “Women as Dramatic Other in the Body Politics of Post-Mao Theater,” in China’s Perception of Peace, War, and the World. Eds., Gerd Kaminski, Barbara Kreissl, and Constantine Tung. Wien: Ludwig Bolzmann Institut fur China, 1997, 160-67.

Cheung, Fanny M. and Eleanor Holroyd, eds. Mainstreaming Gender in Hong Kong. HK: Chinese University Press, 2009.

Chi, Ta-wei. “Performers of the Paternal Past: History, Female Impersonators, and Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction.” positions: east asia cultures critque 15, 3 (Winter 2007): 580-608.

Chiang, Howard, ed. Sexuality in China: Histories of Power and Pleasure. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018.

[Abstract: What was sex like in China, from imperial times through the post-Mao era? The answer depends, of course, on who was having sex, where they were located in time and place, and what kind of familial, social, and political structures they participated in. This collection offers a variety of perspectives by addressing diverse topics such as polygamy, pornography, free love, eugenics, sexology, crimes of passion, homosexuality, intersexuality, transsexuality, masculine anxiety, sex work, and HIV/AIDS. Following a loose chronological sequence, the chapters examine revealing historical moments in which human desire and power dynamics came into play. Collectively, the contributors undertake a necessary historiographic intervention by reconsidering Western categorizations and exploring Chinese understandings of sexuality and erotic orientation. The contributors are Peter J. Carroll, Mirela David, Paul R. Goldin, Debby Chih-yen Huang, Keith McMahon, Elanah Uretsky, Ping Yao, Shana Ye, and Everett Yuehong Zhang.]

Chiang, William Wei. “We Two Know the Script; We Have Become Good Friends”: Linguistic and Social Aspects of the Women’s Script Literacy in Sounthern China. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995.

Chien, Ying-ying. “Revisioning ‘New Women’: Feminist Readings of Representative Modern Chinese Fiction.” Women’s Studies International Forum 17, 1 (1994): 33-45.

—–. “From Utopian to Dystopian World: Two Faces of Feminism in Contemporary Taiwanese Women’s Fiction.” World Literature Today 68, 1 (1994): 35-42.

Chin, Carol C. “Translating the New Woman: Chinese Feminists View of the West, 1905-1915.” Gender and History 18, 5 (Nov. 2006): 490-518.

China for Women: Travel and Culture. NY: Feminist Press, 1995. [collection of essays on Chinese women, includes translations of Ding Ling, Dai Qing, and others]

Chiu, Kuei fen. “Taking Off: A Feminist Approach to Two Contemporary Women’s Novels in Taiwan.” Tamkang Review 23, 1-4 (1992-1993): 709-333.

—–. “Identity Politics in Contemporary Women’s Novels in Taiwan.” Tamkang Review 30, 2 (Winter 1999): 27-54. Rpt in Peng-hisang Chen and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Amsterdam,: Rodopi, 2002, 67-86.

Chou, Katherine Hui-ling. Staging Revolution: Actresses, Realism, and the New Woman Movement in Chinese Spoken Drama and Film, 1919-1949. Ph.D. diss. New York University, 1997.

Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1991.

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.

Chung, Ling. “Sense and Senisilibity in the Works of Women Poets in Taiwan.” In Goldblatt, ed., Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1990, 78-107.

—–. “Feminism and Female Taiwan Writers.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 146-60.

Cini, Francesca. “Le ‘problem des femmes’ dans La nouvelle jeuness, 1915-1922.” Etudes chinoies 5, 1/2 (Spring/Autumn 1986): 133-56.

Collins, Leslie. The New Women: A Psychohistorical Study of the Chinese Feminist Movement from 1900 to the Present. Ph.d. diss. New Haven: Yale University, 1976.

Croll, Elisabeth J. Changing Identities of Chinese Women: Rhetoric, Experience and Self-Perception in Twentieth-Century China. HK: HKUP; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1995.

Dai, Jinhua. “Rewriting Chinese Women: Gender Production and Cultural Space in the Eighties and Nineties.” In Mayfair Mei Hui Yang, ed. Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 191-206.

Damm, Jens. “Both Sides of the Mirror – the Public Discourse on (Homo-)sexuality and Gender in Taiwan.” M.A. project. Berlin Free University.

Decker, Margeret. “Living in Sin: From May Fourth via the Antirightist Movement to the Present.” In Ellen Widmer and David Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentiety-Century China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993, 221-46.

Diamond, Norma. “Women under Kuomintang Rule: Variations of the Feminine Mystique.” Modern China 1, 1 (1975): 3-45.

Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk and Yi Zheng. “A Taste of Class: Manuals for Becoming Woman.” positions: east asia cultures critique 17, 3 (Winter 2009): 489-521.

[Abstract: This discussion addresses the making of woman as postsocialist class-object, developing our core notions of class-making and spiritual homelessness through an exploration of the forms of the feminine in the taste structures in contemporary urban China. The key observation is that beautification, sexual styling, and spiritual/cultural cultivation are consistently linked in narratives of “becoming-woman” in a newly successful genre of aspirational literature, which we are calling “manuals of elite civility.”]

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 Kirk A. 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.

[Description: This is a critical inquiry into the connections between emergent feminist ideologies in China and the production of ‘modern’ women’s writing from the demise of the last imperial dynasty to the founding of the PRC. It accentuates both well-known and under-represented literary voices who intervened in the gender debates of their generation as well as contextualises the stategies used in imagining alternative stories of female experience and potential. It asks two questions: First, how did the advent of enlightened views of gender relations and sexuality influence literary practices of ‘new women’ in terms of narrative forms and strategies, readership, and publication venues? Second, how do these representations attest to the way these female intellectuals engaged and expanded social and political concerns from the personal to the national? Contents: Introduction: Women and Feminism in the Literary History of Early Twentieth-century China; National Imaginaries: Feminist Fantasies at the Turn-of-the-Century; The New Woman’s Woman Love and/or Revolution?: Fictions of the Feminine Self in the 1930s Cultural Left; Outwitting Patriarchy: Comic Narrative Strategies in the Works of Yang Jiang, Su Qing, and Zhang Ailing; A World Still to Win]

—–. “Writing Chinese Feminism(s).” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 228-43.

—–. “1929, September: Gender, Commercialism, and the Literary Market.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 348-54.

Duke, Michael, ed. Modern Chinese Women Writers: Critical Appraisals. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1989.

Edwards, Louise. “Consolidating a Socialist Patriarchy: The Women’s Writers’ Industry and ‘Feminist’ Literary Criticism.” In Antonia Finnan and Ann McLaren, eds. Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture. Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1999, 183-97.

Evans, Harriet. Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gender Since 1949. NY: Continuum, 1997.

—–. “The Language of Liberation: Gender and Jiefang in Early Chinese Communist Party Discourse.” Intersections (Sept. 1998).

—–. “Defining Difference: The ‘Scientific’ Construction of Sexuality and Gender in the PRC.” Signs 20, 2 (Winter 1995).

Farris, Catherine, Anru Lee, and Murray Rubinstein, eds. Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004.

Feeley, Jennifer. “Transforming Sylvia Plath through Contemporary Chinese Women’s Poetry.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, 1 (2017): 38-72.

[Abstract: The introduction and translation of Sylvia Plath’s (1932–63) poetry into Chinese in the 1980s had a significant impact on women’s poetry in contemporary China, particularly the work of Zhai Yongming (b. 1955) and Lu Yimin (b. 1962). Expanding on Lawrence Venuti’s theory of translation and intertextuality, this article explores the relationship between Chinese translations of Plath and the poetry of Zhai and Lu. It examines four sets of Plath translations and the accompanying paratextual commentaries, demonstrating how Plath’s Chinese translators inscribe their individual interpretations onto their translations. It shows how these texts are integral in shaping the early poetic output of Zhai and Lu, who further recontextualize Plath through their own poetry, revealing how Plath has been understood, evaluated, and transformed in contemporary China. Ultimately, this process results in a bold new gendered poetics that marks a turning point in Chinese women’s writing.]

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).]

Ferry, Megan. Chinese Women Writers of the 1930s and Their Critical Reception. Ph.d diss. St. Louis: Washington University, 1998.

—–. “Women’s Literary History: Inventing Tradition in Modern China.” Modern Language Quarterly 66, 3 (Sept. 2005).

—–. “Woman and Her Affinity to Literature: Defining Women Writers’ Roles in China’s Cultural Modernity.” In Charles Laughlin, ed., Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 33-50.

—–. “Marketing Chinese Women Writers in the 1990s, or the Politics of Self-Fashioning.” Journal of Contemporary China 12 (37) (2003): 655-75. Rpt in Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 59-80.

[Abstract: examines the sensation a young group of woman writers caused in 1990s China. Variously named the ‘New, New Generation’, or Glam Lit writers, these women have received critical attention from the literary field and the market. While critics debate the seriousness of their literature, publishing houses are producing their literature at a rapid pace. A governmental ban on the works of two authors, Zhou Weihui and Mian Mian, has fueled readership of black market copies and spurred commentary on the Internet. I argue that the unbridled female sexuality that fuels the sensation of these writers is driven by the publishing market and cultural production, with the complicity of women authors themselves. While the article is critical of the media for exploiting female sexuality, it is also critical of the ambivalence these women writers have toward their own sexuality as well as the authority their writing accords them. . . I point out that while the authors seek to manipulate the market and cultural forces to achieve self-representation they paradoxically support the very same essentialized understanding of female sexuality that the market, critics, and publishers uphold.]

—–. Chinese Women Writers and Modern Print Culture. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2018.

[Abstract: This is the first study to analyze the gendered ideologies of Chinese print media and political culture in a single work. It employs media analysis to examine the way paratexts create and reproduce gendered norms, especially through persistent material and discursive mechanisms that framed women authors and their textual production. Though a plethora of women’s voices resonated throughout the literary publications, journals, and newspapers, these voices were framed by print media’s apparatus that marked women as belonging to a sphere of difference. This marked difference highlights a contradictory outcome of women’s emancipation and gender equality.]

Field, Andrew David. “The Shanghai Lady, 1880s–1990s: A Fictional Figure Adrift in the Maelstrom of Chinese Modernity.” In Lisa Bernstein and Chu-Chueh Cheng, eds. Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai : Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020, 179-98.

Finnane, Antonie and Anne McLaren, eds. Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture. Clayton, Australia: Monash Institute, 1999.

Fiss, Geraldine. “Feminine and Masculine Dimensions of Feminist Thought and Transcultural Modernism in Republican China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 1 (March 2014): 101-24.

[Abstract: This study examines critical essays and imaginative fiction by three key writers of the Republican period: Mao Dun, Ba Jin and Lu Yin. I argue that, while Mao Dun and Ba Jin fuse elements of classical Chinese and modern Western sources so as to create strong heroines and a critique of “new men” for the purpose of revolutionary cultural and national reform, Lu Yin foregrounds an inward examination of the self, multiple narrative points of view and a dialogical perspective which fuses her protagonists’ interior consciousness with external reality as well as other characters’ streams of feeling and thought. My reading of Lu Yin’s texts reveals that she not only succeeds in bringing communion and solace to her readers but also creates “moments of being,” markedly similar to Virginia Woolf’s modernist aesthetics and Walter Benjamin’s mosaic-like “moments of recognition,” which allow her characters to perceive “wholeness” from fragmentary flashes of understanding. These intense moments of awareness enhance Lu Yin’s dialogic imagination and enable her to create discursive feminine narratives that convey the full complexity of women’s consciousness while simultaneously resisting the male realist literary discourse and strengthening her feminist-activist agenda in the national public sphere.]

Gerstlacher, Anna, et al, eds. Women and Literature in China. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1985.

Gilmartin, Christina, et. al., eds. Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.

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 New Woman Commits Suicide: The Press, Cultural Memory and the New Republic.” Journal of Asian Studies 64, 1 (February 2005).

Goodman, Bryna and Wendy Larson, eds. Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. [contributors: Madeleine Yue Dong, Bryna Goodman, Gail Hershatter, Ellen R. Judd, Joan Judge, Wendy Larson, Susan Mann, Kenneth Pomeranz, Tze-lan Deborah Sang, Matthew H. Sommer, Luo Suwen, Catherine Vance Yeh, and Wang Zheng;table of contents]

Gunn, Edward. “Gender and Performativity in Contemporary Narratives from Taiwan and China.” In Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang and Michelle Yeh, eds., Contemporary Chinese Literature: Crossing the Boundaries. Special issue of Literature East and West. Austin, TX: Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, 1995, 5-24.

Guo, Shumei. “New Modes of Women’s Writing in the Age of Materialism.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 159-69.

Haddon, Rosemary. “Representation of Women in Chinese Fiction: The Female Body Subdued, Re(s)trained, (Dis)posessed.” In Anatomy of Gender: Women’s Struggle for the Body. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1991, 81-96.

Hershatter, Gail. “Sexing Modern China.” In Gail Hershatter, et.al., eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996, 77-93.

—–. Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Podernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Beleaguered Husbands: Representations of Marital Breakdown in Some Recent Chinese Fiction.” Tamkang Review 30, 2 (Winter 1999): 111-).

Hom, Sharon K., ed. Chinese Women Traversing Diaspora: Memoirs, Essays, and Poetry. Levittown, NY: Garland, 1998.

Hong, Fan. Footbinding, Feminism, and Freedom: The Liberation of Women’s Bodies in Modern China. London: Frank Cass, 1997.

Hong, Ying. “Mirror and Water–Love Among Women in Chinese Fiction of the 1990s.” In Breaking the Barriers: Chinese Literature Facing the World. Stockholm: The Olof Palme International Center, 1997, 164-177.

Hong Fincher, Leta. Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China. London: Verso, 2018.

[Abstract: On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for thirty-seven days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among China’s educated, urban women. In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest challenge to China’s authoritarian regime today. Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face and their “joy of betraying Big Brother,” as one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness now finding expression through the #MeToo movement, and describing how the Communist regime has suppressed the history of its own feminist struggles, Betraying Big Brother is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.

Hu, Ying. “Writing Erratic Desire: Sexual Politics in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.” In Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder, eds., In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.

—–. 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, Hans Tao-Ming. “From Glass Clique to Tongzhi Nation: Crystal Boys, Identity Formation, and the Politics of Sexual Shame.” positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 2 (Fall 2010): 373-98.

Hung, Chang-tai. “Female Symbols of Resistance in Chinese Wartime Spoken Drama.” Modern China 15 (April 1989): 149-177.

Jenner, W. J. F. “Tough Guys, Mateship and Honour: Another Chinese Tradition.” East Asian History 12 (Dec. 1996).

Jiang, Haixin. “Reclaiming the Female Body: Cases in Chinese Women’s Writing.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 2, 2 (Dec. 2000).

Jiang, Hong. “The Personalization of Literature: Chinese Women’s Writing in the 1990s.” The China Review 3, 1 (Spring 2002).

Jin, Siyan. “Triple Conflicts: Tradition/Modernity, Etiquette/Alienation, We/I.” Tr. James Chin. Chinese Cross Currents 1, 2 (2004): 44-.

Jin, Yanyu. “Three Chinese Women Writers and the City in the 1990s.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 147-57. [deals with Wang Anyi, Shi Shuqing, and Zhu Tianxin]

Judge, Joan. “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalism and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century.” The American Historical Review 106, 3 (June 2001): 765-803.

—–. “Meng Mu Meets the Modern: Female Exemplars in Late-Qing Textbooks for Girls and Women.” Jindai Zhongguo funu shi yanjiu (Research on women in modern Chinese history) 8 (June 2000): 133-77.

—–. “Re-forming the Feminine: Female Literacy and the Legacy of 1898.” In Rebecca Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., The Historical Legacies of the 1898 Reforms in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Center, 2002, 158-79.

—–. “Citizens or Mothers of Citizens?: Gender and the Meaning of Modern Chinese Citizenship.” In Elizabeth Perry and Merle Goldman, eds., Citizenship in Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Contemporary China Series, 2002, 23-43.

—–. “The Ideology of ‘Good Wives and Wise Mothers’: Meiji Japan and the Formulation of Feminine Modernity in Late Qing China.” In Joshua A. Fogel, eds., Sagacious Monks and Bloodthirsty Warriors: Chinese Views of Japan in the Ming-Qing Period. San Francisco: EastBridge, 2002, 218-48.

—–. “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). Rpt. in n Grace S. Fong, Nanxiu Qian, and Harriet T. Zurndorfer, eds., Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 102-35.

—–. The Precious Raft of History The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

[Abstract: This book develops a new approach to historical change at the turn of the twentieth century, a crucial stage in the unfolding of Chines modernity. Its focus is on the fraught and momentous woman question, which foregrounded the cultural paradoxes and political aspirations that define the era. Judge probes Chinese approaches to their own past and the modern West (mediated via Japan) through close examination of the varied cultural and political uses of female biography—a genre with a 2,000-year history in China and a new political salience in the early twentieth century. She analyzes the way a range of male and female actors appropriated historical Chinese and modern Western women’s biographies to promote competing vision of female virtue, talent, and heroism—and by extension, to advance competing evaluations of China’s ritual teachings, cultural heritage and national future. Judge cogently maps these various approaches and establishes a new hermeneutics of historical change. At the same time, she highlights disjunctions among representations of exemplar heroines and between such representations and women’s actual lives by ending each chapter with a methodologically innovative counterpoint. Excavating traces of the often highly mediate experience of China’s first generation of female political activists, overseas students, schoolteachers, and public writers, she question the ways long-standing and newly defined gender categories took on–or failed to take on—efficacy in women’s everyday lives. Judge concludes by evaluating how women’s issues continue to illuminate Chinese understandings of the past, the West, and the nation at the turn of the twenty-first century.]

Kao, Hsin-sheng C. Nativism Overseas: Contemporary Chinese Women Writers. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. [translations of and articles about women’s exile writing]

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.

Khoo, Olivia. The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007.

[Abstract: examines new representations of diasporic Chinese femininity emerging from Asia Pacific modernities since the late twentieth century. Through an analysis of cultural artefacts such as films, popular fiction, food and fashion cultures, the book challenges the dominant tendency in contemporary cultural politics to define Chinese femininity from a mainland perspective that furthermore equates it with notions of primitivism. Rather, the book argues for a radical reconfiguration of the concept of exoticism as a frame for understanding these new representations. This engaging study raises important questions on the relationship between the Chinese diasporas and gender. The Chinese Exotic provides a timely critical intervention into the current visualizations of diasporic Chinese femininity. The book contends that an analysis of such images can inform the reconfigured relations between China, the Chinese diasporas, Asia and the West in the context of contemporary globalization, and in turn takes these new intersections to account for the complex nature of modern definitions of diasporic Chinese femininity.]

Kwok, Pui-lan. Chinese Women and Christianity, 1860-1927. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992.

Lan, Hua and Vanessa Fong, guest eds. “The ‘Woman Question’: Selected Essays form the May Fourth Era Women’s Emancipation Movement.” Special issue of Chinese Studies of History 31, 2 (Winter 1997/98).

—–, eds. Women in Republican China: A Sourcebook. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1999.

Larson, Wendy. “The End of ‘Funu wenxue’: Women’s Literature from 1925 to 1935.” Modern Chinese Literature 4, 1/2 (1988): 39-54. Rpt. in Tani Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, 58-73.

—–. “Female Subjectivity and Gender Relations: The Early Stories of Lu Yin and Bing Xin.” In Xiaobing Tang and Kang Liu, eds. Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, 124-43.

—–. Women and Writing in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

—–. “Woman, Moral Virtue, and Literary Text” [edited chapter of Women and Writing in Modern China]. In Corinne H. Dale, ed., Chinese Aesthetics and Literature: A Reader. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004, 55-69.

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. “Producing Norms, Deining Beauty: The Role of Science in the Regulation of the Female Body and Sexuality in Liangyou and Furen Huabao.” In Paul Pickowicz, Kuiyi Shen, and Yingjin Zhang, eds., Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926-1945. Lieden: Brill, 2013, 111-31.

—–. 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, 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 pivotal issues such as semi-coloniality, psychoanalysis, modern love, feminism, and urbanization.]

—–. “Modern Intellectual Masculinities in Transformation.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 277-87.

Leutner, Mechthild and Nicola Spakowski, eds. Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspetive. Munster: Lit Verlag, 2005.

Li, Jessica Tsui Yan. “Food, Body and Female Subjectivity: Reading between Western and Chinese Perspectives.” In Kwok-kan Tamand Terry Siu Han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 53-76.

—–. “Female Body and Identities: Re-presenting Ibsen’s Nora in China Doll.” In K.K. Tam, Terry S. Yip and Frode Helland eds. Ibsen and the Modern Self. Hong Kong: Open University of Hong Kong Press, and Oslo: Centre for Ibsen’s Studies, University of Oslo Publications, 2010, 298-310.

Li, Xiaojiang. “Resisting While Holding the Tradition: Claims for Rights Raised in Literature by Chinese Women Writers in the New Period.” Tamkang Review 30, 2 (Winter, 1999): 99-110. Rpt. in Peng-hisang Chen and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Amsterdam,: Rodopi, 2002, 109-116.

Li, Xiaojiang and Zhang Xiaodan. “Creating a Space for Women: Women’s Studies in China.” In China for Women: Travel and Culture. NY: Feminist Press, 1995, 173-90.

Li, Ziyun. “The Disappearance and Revival of Feminine Discourse.” In Peng-hisang Chen and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Amsterdam,: Rodopi, 2002, 117-26.

Licandro, Daniela. “Writing Depression: Li Lanni’s Nobody in the Wilderness.” Other Modernities 32 (Nov. 2024): 262-78.

[Abstract: Nobody in the Wilderness: A Mental Health Record of a Patient with Depression (2008) is the first of a number of memoirs that contemporary Chinese writer Li Lanni (1956- ) has composed to document her fight against the depression that hit her in 2003, after being cured of thyroid cancer. The memoir brings together Li’s diary entries from different moments of her life, excerpts from her (semi-)autobiographical literary production since the 1980s, memories of life during the Cultural Revolution, medical reports, extracts from scientific studies of mental illness, Bible citations, accounts of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic, and much more. This stratified narrative, where different genres, discourses, and temporalities intersect, encourages a new reflection on depression, its embodiment, and its meanings. Drawing on literary and medical anthropological understandings of embodiment and illness, this article examines Li Lanni’s articulation of depression to shed light on the potential of writing to destigmatize depression and legitimize her particular embodiment of illness against objectifying biomedical and socio-cultural discourses. The analysis of the narrativization of depression as a “montage” of heterogeneous elements and of the reconfiguration of illness as “hereditary”—at once bound to personal, familial, and collective experiences—illuminates the multiple ways in which the memoir complicates body/mind dichotomies and notions of responsibility in contexts of illness. Ultimately, bearing witness to suffering that transcends Li’s own suffering, the memoir acquires an ethical dimension that rests on the ambiguous relationship between the personal and the collective.]

Lieberman, Sally Taylor. The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

Lin, Shuming and He Songyu. “Feminist Literary Criticism in China since the Mid-1990s.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 35-52.

Liou, Liang-ya. “Gender Crossing and Decadence in Taiwan Fiction at the Fin-de-siecle.” In John C. Hawley ed., Post-colonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. 71-86.

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, Lydia. “Invention and Intervention: The Making of a Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Ellen Widmer and David Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentiety-Century China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993, 194-220.

—–. “The Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature: Negotiating Feminisms across East/West Boundaries.” Genders 12 (Winter, 1991): 22-44.

Liu, Lydia, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. NY: Columbia University Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Shaoling Ma /MCLC Resource Center review by Tani Barlow]

[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?1929), 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.]

Lo, Kwai-Cheung. “Men Aren’t Men: Feminization of the Masculine Subject in the Works of Some Hong Kong Male Writers.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 225-44.

Lo, Man-wa. “Female Initiation and Subjectivity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.” Comparative Literature and Culture 3 (Sept. 1998): 74-87.

Louie, Kam. Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [reviewed by Chris Berry in Intersections 8 (Oct. 2002)].

—–. “The Niangpao (Effeminate Men) Controversy in China: How to Be a Real Man in the Family, School, and Society.” Women’s Studies International Forum 102 (2024).

[Abstract: This paper examines the controversies surrounding the “niangpao” (effeminate men or sissy boys) in the context of the debates surrounding Asian values, Confucianism and family values. These debates are ostensibly about what constitutes correct Chinese male behaviour. But the vehemence with which they are expressed betray their inherent patriarchal bent. Traditional masculinist mindsets cannot be practiced so easily now, partly becausegender roles are changing and Chinese women and young activists are more assertive, and they have largefollowings on social media. For example, the resurrection of Confucian ideals saw the return of emphasis placed on educational achievements. But whereas traditionally successful examination candidates (always men) were guaranteed good careers, both male and female graduates now feel short-changed. It is in this environment that the niangpao polemics are carried out. I argue that despite sanctions from authorities, much of public opinion continues to uphold notions of gender diversity and respect.]

Louie, Kam and Morris Low, eds. Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan. NY, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

Lu, Sheldon H. “Popular Culture and Body Politics: Beauty Writers in Contemporary China.” Modern Language Quarterly 69, 1 (2008): 167-85.

[Abstract: This essay is a study of a group of women writers who emerged on the Chinese literary scene in the late 1990s and the turn of the twenty-first century. They have been called beauty writers (meinü zuojia), referring to the authors themselves being beautiful women. Their writings are characterized by an unabashed, unprecedented foregrounding of female sexuality. While their novels were censored by the state now and then, they circulate on the Internet and contribute to the formation of China’s booming Internet literature. The initial core group of beauty writers has made a large impact on other aspiring female writers eager to explore and expose their sensuality and sexuality. The parading and pandering of female subjectivity via a body politics have become a major literary fad in contemporary mainland China.]

Lu, Tonglin. Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993.

Luo, Suwen. “Gender on Stage: Actresses in an Actors’ World (1895-1930).” In Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds., Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, 75-96.

Ma, 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.

—–. “Constructing Manchukuo Womanhood to Serve Japanese Imperialism.” The Journal of Georgia Association of History (2005).

Martin, Fran. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representations in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. HK: University of Hong Kong Press, 2003. [reviewed by Kam Louie in Intersections 10 (Aug. 2004)].

McDougall, Bonnie S. “Discourse on Privacy by Women Writers in Late Twentieth Century China.” China Information 19, 1 (March 2005): 97-119.

McLaren, Anne E. “Crossing Gender Boundaries in China: Nushu Narratives.” Intersections (Sept. 1998).

Mei Sheng 梅生, ed. Zhongguo funu wenti taolun ji 中國婦女問題討論及 (Collection of discussion on the Chinese women’s question). 6 vols. Shanghai: Xin wenhua, 1934 (originally published in 1923).

Meng, Liansu. The Inferno Tango: Gender Politics and Modern Chinese Poetry, 1917-1980. Ph.d. diss. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2010. [see Dissertation Reviews review by Dun Wang]

Meng, Yue. “Female Images and National Myth.” In T. Barlow, ed. Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Meng Yue 孟悦 and Dai Jinhua 戴锦华. Fuchu lishi dibiao 浮出历史地标 (Emerging from the horizon of history). Henan: Henan renmin, 1989.

Mittler, Barbara. “Reading Women: Rethinking a Trope in the Socialist Modern and Beyond.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. NY: Routledge, 2023, 297-329.

Ng, Sandy. Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China: Redefining Female Identity through Modern Design and Lifestyle. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024.

[Abstract: … explores the role played by woman, and their visual representations, in introducing modern design and modern ways of living to China. It investigates this through an analysis of how women and modern design were represented in the advertisements, photographs, and films of Republican-era China. This study explores the intersection of modernity and the Chinese woman, as they negotiated their changing identities through, and with, new designs that proliferated in Chinese households in the first half of the twentieth century. The advertisements, mass media, photographs and films took on the function of social conditioning, conveying to the viewers ideas of modern social standards, behavior and appearances. With women both instrumentalised within these images, and addressed through them, their visual representations became metaphors that fashioned a new portrait of China, while concurrently impacting on the identity, agency and subjectivity of women themselves.]

Ono, Kazuko. Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850-1950. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989.

Orliski, Constance. “The Bourgeois Housewife as Laborer in Late Qing and Early Republican Shanghai.” Nan Nü 5, 1 ( 2003): 43-68.

Palandri, Angela, ed. Women Writers of Twentieth-Century China. Eugene: Asian Studies Publications, University of Oregon, 1982.

Peng, Hsiao-yen. “Sex Histories: Zhang Jingsheng’s Sexual Revolution.” Tamkang Review 30, 2 (Winter 1999): 71-98.

Roberts, Rosemary. “Chinese Women Writers and Their Responses to Western Feminism.” Asian Studies Review 18, 2 (1994).

—–. “Women’s Studies in Literature and Feminist Literary Criticism in Contemporary China.” In Antonia Finnane and Ann McLaren, eds., Dress, Sex, and Text in Chinese Culture. Clayton, AUS: Monash Asia Institute, 1999, 225-40.

—–. “Gendering the Revolutionary Body: Theatrical Costume in Cultural Revolution China.” Asian Studies Review 30, 2 (June 2006).

Rofel, Lisa. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Berkeley: UCP, 1999.

Sang, Tze-lan D. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

—–. “The Modern Girl in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 411-23.

Schaffer, Kay and Xianlin Song. Women Writers in Postsocialist China. London: Routledge, 2014.

[Abstract: What does it mean to read from elsewhere? Women Writers in Postsocialist China introduces readers to a range and variety of contemporary Chinese women’s writing, which has seen phenomenal growth in recent years. The book addresses the different ways women’s issues are understood in China and the West, attending to the processes of translation, adaptation, and the grafting of new ideas with existing Chinese understandings of gender, feminism, subjectivity, consumerism and (post) modernism. By focusing on women’s autobiographical, biographical, fictional and historical writing, the book engages in a transcultural flow of ideas between western and indigenous Chinese feminisms. Taking account of the accretions of social, cultural, geographic, literary, economic, and political movements and trends, cultural formations and ways of thinking, it asks how the texts and the concepts they negotiate might be understood in the social and cultural spaces within China and how they might be interpreted differently elsewhere in the global locations in which they circulate. The book argues that women-centred writing in China has a direct bearing on global feminist theory and practice. This critical study of selected genres and writers highlights the shifts in feminist perspectives within contemporary local and global cultural landscapes.]

Sheng, Ying. “Feminist Critique: The Patriarchal Discourse of Chinese Male Writers.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 125-46.

Shi, Liang. “Constructing a New Sexual Paradigm: Emergence of a Modern Subject.” Prism 17, 2 (2020).

Siu, Bobby. Women of China: Imperialism and Women’s Resistance, 1900-1949. London: ZED Press, 1982.

Smedley, Agnes. Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1976.

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.

[Abstract: 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.

[Abstract: 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.

Song, Geng. The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004.

Song, Geng and Derek Hird. Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

[Abstract: Geng Song and Derek Hird offer an account of Chinese masculinities in media discourse and everyday life, covering masculinities on television, in lifestyle magazines, in cyberspace, at work, at leisure, and at home. No other work covers the forms and practices of men and masculinities in contemporary China so comprehensively. Through carefully exploring the global, regional and local influences on men and representations of men in postmillennial China, Song and Hird show that Chinese masculinity is anything but monolithic. They reveal a complex, shifting plurality of men and masculinities–from stay-at-home internet geeks to karaoke-singing, relationship-building businessmen–which contest and consolidate “conventional” notions of masculinity in multiple ways.]

Spakowski, Nicola. “‘Gender’ Trouble: Feminism in China under the Impact of Western Theory and the Spatialization of Identity.” positions: east asia cultures critique 19, 1 (Spring 2011): 31-54.

Stacy, Judith. Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Stevens, Sarah E. “Figuring Modernity: The New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China.” NWSA Journal 15, 3 (2003): 82-103.

—–. Making Female Sexuality in Republican China: Women’s Bodies in the Discourses of Hygiene, Education, and Literature. Ph. D. diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2001.

Tam, Kwok-kan. “Gender Construction, Stereotyping and Cross-Gender Writing.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 19-34.

Tam, Kwok-kan and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds. Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010.

Teoh, Karen M. “Exotic Flowers, Modern Girls, Good Citizens: Female Education and Overseas Chinese Identity in British Malaya and Singapore, 1900s-1950s.” Twentieth-Century China 35, 2 (2010): 25-51.

Thakur, Ravni. Rewriting Gender: Reading Contemporary Chinese Women. London: Zed Books, 1997.

Tso, Sarah Yihsuan. “My Body, My Poetry”: Ai-lin Yen’s and Taiwanese Women Poets’ Poetics of the Body.” The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 9, 1 (Dec. 2015): 29-59.

[Abstract: With the tenet of “my body, my poetry,” this paper argues that poetry written by women claims the right to articulate the female body and champions the validity of their poems about the female body. Rather than being denominated in literary history as an alternative school of carnality, women’s poetry about the body should be judged by its aesthetic value. A pioneer among Taiwanese women poets on the subject of the body, Ai-lin Yen in Bone, Skin, and Flesh (1997) advances a personal feminism which is frank and honest about female desire as well as the female body, and about the exploitation of the female body. Yen’s poems expand on the motility and stases of the drives and abjection, and sketch what Elaine Showalter calls a “double-voiced discourse” in dialectical relationships with both male and female traditions.]

Wang, David Der-wei. “Fin de siecle Splendor: Contemporary Women Writers’ Vision of Taiwan.” Modern Chinese Literature 6, 1/2 (1992): 39-60. [treats Zhu Tianwen, Ping Lu and Li Ang]

—–. “Feminist Consciousness in Modern Chinese Male Fiction.” In Michael S. Duke, ed., Modern Chinese Women Writers. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1989.

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, Fei. “Literary Calls from Women Novelists.” In Peng-hisang Chen and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Amsterdam,: Rodopi, 2002, 187-98.

Wang, Lingzhen. Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

—–. “Reproducing the Self: Consumption, Imaginary, and Identity in Chinese Women’s Autobiographical Practice in the 1990s.” In Charles Laughlin, ed., Contested Modernity in Chinese Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 173-92. [deals primarily with Chen Ran’s Private Life and Lin Bai’s Self at War]

Wang, Ning. “Feminist Theory and Contemporary Chinese Female Literature.” In Peng-hisang Chen and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Amsterdam,: Rodopi, 2002, 199-210.

Wang, Shuzhu. The Double-Voiced Feminine Discourses: A Comparative Study of Women Writers in Modern Chinese Literature and Modern American Literature. Ph.d. diss. Purdue University, 2001.

Wang, Zheng. Women and the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

—–. “Creating a Feminist Discourse.” In Wang, Women and the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 35-66.

—–. Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.

Wei, Yanmei. The Representation of Femininity and Mother-Daughter Relationships in Chinese Literature. Ph.D. diss. SUNY, Stonybrook, 1999.

Wesoky, Sharon. Chinese Feminism Faces Globalization. NY: Routledge, 2002.

Widmer, Ellen. “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, Lisa Lai-Ming. “Liberation of Femininity? Women’s Poetry in Post-Mao China.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 91-108.

Wong, Kam-ming and Angelina Yee. Better by Half: Contemporary Chinese Women Writers. Forthcoming.

Wu, Cuncun. “Beautiful Boys Made Up as Beautiful Girls: Anti-Masculine Taste in Qing China.” In Kam Louie and Morris Low, eds., Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan. NY, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

Wusi shiqi funu wenti wenxuan 五四时期妇女问题文选 (Selected writings of the May Fourth ‘women’s problem’ debate). Beijing: Sanlian, 1981.

Xiao, Hui Faye. Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Yipeng Shen]

Xiong, Yuezhi. “The Theory and Practice of Women’s Rights in Late Qing Shanghai, 1843-1911.” In Kai-wing Chow, Tze-ki Hon, Hung-yok Ip, and Don Price, eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.

Xu, Xiaoqun. “The Discourse of Love, Marriage, and Sexuality in Post-Mao China; or, A Reading of the New Journalistic Literature on Women.” Positions 4, 2 (Fall 1996).

Yan, Haiping. Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948. Routledge, 2006.

[Contents: Introduction; (1) Unseen Rhythms, Sea Change; (2) Qiu Jin and Her Imaginary; (3) The Stars of Night: Bing Xin and the Literary Constellation of the 1920s; (4) Other Life: Bai Wei, Yuan Changying, and Social Dramas in the 1930s; (5) War, Death, and the Art of Existence: Mobile Women in the 1940s; (6) Rhythms of the Unreal [I]: Early Ding Ling and a Feminist Passage; (7) Rhythms of the Unreal [II]: The Ding Ling Story and the Chinese Revolution]

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.]

Yang, Mayfair Mei Hui, ed. Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

—–. “From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women’s Public Sphere in China.” In Mayfair Mei Hui Yang, ed. Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 1-31.

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.

—–. Untamed Shrew: Negotiating New Womanhood in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: Untamed Shrews traces the evolution of unruly women in Chinese literature, from the reviled “shrew” to the celebrated “new woman.” Notorious for her violence, jealousy, and promiscuity, the character of the shrew personified the threat of unruly femininity to the Confucian social order and served as a justification for punishing any woman exhibiting these qualities. In this book, Shu Yang connects these shrewish qualities to symbols of female empowerment in modern China. Rather than meeting her demise, the shrew persisted, and her negative qualities became the basis for many forms of the new woman, ranging from the early Republican suffragettes and Chinese Noras, to the Communist and socialist radicals. Criticism of the shrew endured, but her vicious, sexualized, and transgressive nature became a source of pride, placing her among the ranks of liberated female models. Untamed Shrews shows that whether male writers and the state hate, fear, or love them, there will always be a place for the vitality of unruly women. Unlike in imperial times, the shrew in modern China stayed untamed as an inspiration for the new woman.]

Yang, Xin. From Beauty Fear To Beauty Fever: A Critical Study of Contemporary Chinese Female Writers. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.

[Abstract: looks at a ?glamorous? literary and cultural moment in China at the turn of the twenty-first century, namely that of the high-profile female writers born in the 1970s. Dubbed as ?beauty writers?, they brought to light a series of literary, cultural, and social issues at an important moment of institutional and ideological transformation, when China was more actively participating in the global market economy. The discourse of beauty writers is closely related to the changing ideology from ?beauty fear? to ?beauty fever?. Beauty fear resulted from the revolutionary ambition of denouncing the old institutionalized ideologies and embracing gender equality. Beauty fever was driven by commercialization in the mid- and late 1990s, when globalization became the new social reality and broke the boundaries of world/China, official/folk, and elite/mass. After years of revolutionary policies of gender erasure, beauty fever was the product of the intertwined narratives of resistance politics, feminism, capitalism, consumerism, and the postmodern ludic carnival.]

Yeh, Catherine Vance. “Playing with the Public: Late Qing Courtesans and Their Opera Singer Lovers.” In Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds., Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, 145-68.

Yen, Hsiao-Pei. “Body Politics, Modernity and National Salvation: The Modern Girl and the New Life Movement.” Asian Studies Review 29 (June 2005): 165-86.

—–. “Women’s Self-Identity and Gender Relations in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 1-18.

Yue, Daiyun and Carolyn Wakeman. “Women in Recent Chinese Fiction–A Review Article.” Journal of Asian Studies 42 (1983): 884-87.

Yue, Mingbao. Woman and Representation: Feminist Readings of Modern Chinese Fiction. Ph.D. diss. Stanford University, 1991.

—–. “Gendering the Origins of Modern Chinese Fiction.” In Lu Tonglin, ed., Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993, 47-65.

—–. “Am I That Name?: Women’s Writing as Cultural Translation in Early 1920’s China.” Journal of Comparative Literature (Fall 2000).

Zang, Jian. “‘Women Returning Home’–A Topic of Chinese Women’s Liberation.” In Mechthild Leutner and Nicola Spakowski, eds., Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective. Munster: Lit, 2005, 376-95.

Zhang, Jeanne Hong. “Gender in Post-Mao China.” European Review 11, 2 (May 2003): 209-24.

[Abstract: Post-Mao gender discourse readjusts a politicized vision of gender based on Maoist ethics. While rejecting revolutionary concepts of sex equality, contemporary Chinese women embrace a notion of femininity through the revision of a traditional conception of womanhood as well as the construction of new role models. Women poets participate in this construction process with a fresh, powerful voice to express their gender consciousness. In their efforts to (re-)define womanhood, they present by poetic means radically gendered perspectives.]

—–. The Invention of a Discourse: Women’s Poetry from Contemporary China. Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2004. [MCLC Resource Center review by Paul Manfredi]

—–. “A Night of Their Own: Gender Identity in Women’s Poetry after Mao.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 6, 1 (2005): 90-118.

Zhang, Jingyuan. “Breaking Open: Chinese Women’s Writing in the Late 1980s and 1990s.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, 1161-79.

Zhao, Jamie J. and Hongwei Bao, eds. Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality. Abington and New York: Routledge, 2024. [MCLC Resource Center review by Chris Berry]

Zhongguo funu yundong lishi ziliao 中国妇女运动历史资料 (History materials on the history of the Chinese women’s movement). Vol 1: 1840-1918; vol 2 1918-1937; vol 3 1937-1945. Beijing: Zhongguo funu, 1991.

Zhong, Xueping. Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

Zhou, Jinghao. Remaking China’s Public Philosophy and Chinese Women’s Liberation: The Volatile Mixing of Confucianism, Marxism, and Feminism. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2006.

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, Ping and Hui Faye Xiao, eds. Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Lina Qu]

[Abstract: The year 1995, when the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, marks a historical milestone in the development of the Chinese feminist movement. In the decades that followed, three distinct trends emerged: first, there was a rise in feminist NGOs in mainland China and a surfacing of LGBTQ movements; second, social and economic developments nurtured new female agency, creating a vibrant, women-oriented cultural milieu in China; third, in response to ethnocentric Western feminism, some Chinese feminist scholars and activists recuperated the legacies of socialist China’s state feminism and gender policies in a new millennium. These trends have brought Chinese women unprecedented choices, resources, opportunities, pitfalls, challenges, and even crises. In this timely volume, Zhu and Xiao offer an examination of the ways in which Chinese feminist ideas have developed since the mid-1990s. By juxtaposing the plural “feminisms” with “Chinese characteristics,” they both underline the importance of integrating Chinese culture, history, and tradition in the discussions of Chinese feminisms, and, stress the difference between the plethora of contemporary Chinese feminisms and the singular state feminism. The twelve chapters in this interdisciplinary collection address the theme of feminisms with Chinese characteristics from different perspectives rendered from lived experiences, historical reflections, theoretical ruminations, and cultural and sociopolitical critiques, painting a panoramic picture of Chinese feminisms in the age of globalization.]

Zhu, Yun. Imagining Sisterhood in Modern Chinese Texts, 1890-1937. Lanham, MD: 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.”]

Same-Sex/Queer Literature and Culture

Bao, Hongwei. Queer Comrade: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ari Larissa Heinrich]

[Abstract: This very timely, well-written and insightful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in the People’s Republic of China today is more than a study of ‘queer China’ through the lens of male homosexuality; it also examines the PRC’s socialist legacy and considers how the country is undergoing rapid transformations under the influence of transnational capitalism. Moreover, although the first of its kind from a cultural studies perspective, this interdisciplinary study speaks to scholars working in disparate fields and provides a sorely needed historical perspective on a very recent phenomenon: queer activism in China. Combining textual analysis of contemporary queer films, fiction and personal diaries, in conjunction with ethnographic research conducted in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou’s urban gay communities, the book offers a queer Marxist analysis of sexual identity and social movements in contemporary China, where ideological negotiations between socialism and neoliberalism are constantly played out in the formation of public cultures and intimate spheres. Here, the book critically assesses the role of Marxism and China’s socialist legacy in shaping sexual identity, queer popular culture and political activism. Apart from its rich data and incisive analysis, the book has a freshness and persuasiveness in approach and argument. The text is also pleasant and readable, with the author’s intelligence, engagement and sunny humour shining through his writing.]

—–. Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture under Postsocialism. Routledge India, 2020.

[Abstract: This book analyses queer cultural production in contemporary China to map the broad social transformations in gender, sexuality and desire. It examines queer literature and visual cultures in China’s post-Mao and postsocialist era to show how these diverse cultural forms and practices not only function as context specific and culturally sensitive forms of social activism, but also produce distinct types of gender and sexual subjectivities unique to China’s postsocialist conditions. From poetry to papercutting art, from ‘comrade/gay literature’ to girls love fan fiction, from lesbian films to activist documentaries, and from a drag show in Shanghai to a public performance of same-sex wedding in Beijing, the book reveals a queer China in all its ideological complexity and creative energy. Empirically rich and methodically eclectic, Queer China skilfully weaves together historical and archival research, textual and discourse analysis, along with interviews and ethnography. Breaking new ground and bringing a non-Western perspective to the fore, this transdisciplinary work contributes to multiple academic fields including literary and cultural studies, media and communication studies, film and screen studies, contemporary art, theatre and performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, China/Asia and Global South studies, cultural history and cultural geography, political theory and the study of social movements.]

—–. “Queer Disidentification: Or How to Cook Chinese Noodles in a Global Pandemic?” PORTAL 17, 1/2 (2020).

[Abstract: In an online research seminar titled ‘Intimacies in Asia in a Time of Pandemics’ (GCS Sydney 2020), Hans Tao-Ming Huang, a queer studies scholar from National Central University, Taiwan, compares the geopolitics in the current COVID-19 pandemic to a ‘new Cold War’. This war is characterised by an intense political and ideological antagonism between communist China and the liberal, democratic world led by the United States. In this antagonism, national borders are redrawn; political and ideological affiliations are re-enforced. As was the case with the last Cold War, the political and ideological affiliation of queer-identified people are under constant scrutiny. Queer people from China are often forced to take a stance by making a choice between China and the rest of the world, and between a country where LGBTQ rights are not recognised and the part of the world where same-sex marriages have been legalised and gay people can be ‘out and proud’, and between illiberal neoliberalism and liberal neoliberalism. This is a choice easier for some than others. As a queer-identified person born in the People’s Republic of China and currently living in the UK, I constantly feel the pressure to declare my own political and ideological allegiances. The ‘new Cold War’ accompanying the global pandemic has only exacerbated the pressure.]

—–. Queer Media in China. London: Routledge, 2021.

[Abstract: This book examines different forms and practices of queer media, that is, the films, websites, zines, and film festivals produced by, for, and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in China in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It traces how queer communities have emerged in urban China and identifies the pivotal role that community media have played in the process. It also explores how these media shape community cultures and perform the role of social and cultural activism in a country where queer identities have only recently emerged and explicit forms of social activism are under serious political constraints. Importantly, because queer media is ‘niche’ and ‘narrowcasting’ rather than ‘broadcasting’ and ‘mass communication,’ the subject compels a rethinking of some often-taken-for-granted assumptions about how media relates to the state, the market, and individuals. Overall, the book reveals a great deal about queer communities and identities, queer activism, and about media and social and political attitudes in China.]

Bao, Hongwei and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds. Queer Literature in the Sinosphere. London: Bloomsbury, 2024.

[Abstract: Queer Literature in the Sinosphere is the most up-to-date English-language study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) themed literature and culture in the Chinese-speaking world. From classical homoerotic texts to contemporary boys’ love fan fiction, this book showcases the richness and diversity of queer Chinese literature across the full spectrum of genres, styles, topics and cultural politics. The book features authors and literary works from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the global Chinese diaspora. Featuring chapters by leading scholars from around the world, this book rewrites literature, history and culture from a queer lens in China and globally.]

Berry, Chris. Fran Martin and Audrey Yue, eds. Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Chen, Li-fen. “Queering Taiwan: In Search of Nationalism’s Other.” Modern China 37 (2011): 384-421.

[Abstract: This article deals with the formation of Taiwan’s homosexual cultural politics in the 1990s, the impact and implications of which are yet to be examined within the larger context of Taiwan’s cultural and political development and ethnic relationships. It is argued that the rise of this cultural politics is both a reflection and a source of a growing sense of identity crisis on the island. By examining the configurations of “queer” in various discursive domains, this interdisciplinary study seeks to delineate the cross-referencing ideological network of this cultural movement and its entanglement with the complexity of Taiwan’s nationalism. At the same time, to the extent that this movement tends to present itself as a radical politics from a privileged epistemological and cultural standpoint, this claimed radicalism is also scrutinized for its problematics and ironies.]

Chi, Ta-wei. “Plural Not Singular: Homosexuality in Taiwanese Literature of the 1960s.” In Howard Chiang and Yin Wang, eds., Perverse Taiwan. NY: Routledge, 2017.

Chiang, Howard Hsueh-Hao and Larisa N. Heinrich, eds., Queer Sinophone Cultures. NY: Routledge, 2014.

Chiang, Howard and Yin Wang, eds. Perverse Taiwan. NY: Routledge, 2017.

[Abstract: Host of the first gay pride in the Sinophone world, Taiwan is well-known for its mushrooming of liberal attitudes towards non-normative genders and sexualities after the lifting of Martial Law in 1987. Perverse Taiwan is the first collection of its kind to contextualize that development from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on its genealogical roots, sociological manifestations, and cultural representations. This book enriches and reorients our understanding of postcolonial queer East Asia. Challenging a heteronormative understanding of Taiwan’s past and present, it provides fresh critical analyses of a range of topics from queer criminality and literature in the 1950s and 1960s to the growing popularity of cross-dressing performance and tongzhi (gay and lesbian) cinema on the cusp of a new millennium. Together, the contributions provide a detailed account of the rise and transformations of queer cultures in post-World War II Taiwan. By instigating new dialogues across disciplinary divides, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars of Asian studies and queer studies, especially those interested in history, anthropology, literature, film, media, and performance.]

Chiang, Howard, with Hangping Xu. “Queer Taiwanese Literature as World Literature: A Conversation.” In Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds. Queer Literature in the Sinosphere. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, 253-67.

Chou, Wah-Shan. Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies. New York: Haworth Press, 2000.

Cristini, Remy. The Rise of Comrade Literature: Significance and Development of a New Chinese Genre. MA Thesis. Leiden University, 2005.

—–. “Gay Literature from China: In Search of a Happy Ending.” IIAS Newsletter 31 (2003): 27.

Damm, Jens. “Same Sex Desire and Society in Taiwan, 1970–1987.” The China Quarterly 181 (March 2005): 67

—–. “Contemporary Discourses on Homosexuality in Republican China: A Critical Analysis of Terminology and Current Research.” In Mechthild Leutner and Nicola Spakowski, eds., Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective. Munster: Lit, 2005, 282-311.

Engebretsen, Elisabeth L., Willam F. Schroeder, and Hongwei Bao, eds., Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2015.

[Abstract: This book brings together some of the most exciting, original and cutting-edge work being conducted on contemporary queer China. The volume includes original essays by some of the most prolific and central queer activists and artists in the PRC, placing their writing alongside work by emergent and established scholars from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. The book offers unique perspectives by presenting primary accounts of the creative and multi-faceted strategies that activists and community organizers have developed in their various activities. The volume also presents rich, empirical evidence of every-day queer lives across China, offering a unique record not only of cosmopolitan community and activist perspectives but also of voices and experiences from a broad range of locations and identifications. As a whole it offers invaluable insights into sexual and gender diversity in China today. Queer/Tongzhi China thus breathes as it speaks, providing through its diverse approaches a different understanding of queer China than standard mono-ethnographies or social-scientific documentaries.]

Fang, Fu Ruan and Vern L. Bullough. “Lesbianism in China.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 21, 3 (1992): 217-226.

——.”Same-Sex Love in Contemporary China.” In Aart Hendriks, Rob Tielman and Evert van der Veen, eds., The Third Pink Book: A Global View of Lesbian and Gay Liberation and Oppression. Prometheus Books, 1993, 46-53.

Ge, Liang. “The Little Mushroom as the Queer/Wild: Disordering Desire and Desiring Disorder in the Post-Anthropocene.” In Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds. Queer Literature in the Sinosphere. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, 203-19.

Guo, Jie. “From Patriarchal Polygamy to Conjugal Monogamy: Imagining Male Same-Sex Relationship in Modern China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, 1 (Spring 2013): 165-205.

—–. “The Male Dan at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century: Wu Jiwen’s Fin-de-siècle Boylove Reader.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 18, 1 (March 2021): 70-88.

[Abstract: Reading the Taiwanese author Wu Jiwen’s 1996 novel Fin-de-siècle Boylove Reader (Shijimo shaonian’ai duben), this essay considers the age-old figure of the male dan and the critical role it played in the emerging gay scene in the Sinophone world at the turn of the twenty-first century. Based on the Qing author Chen Sen’s novel Precious Mirror for the Appreciation of Flowers (Pinhua baojian), Wu’s version resorts to the figure of the male dan, often referred to as xianggong, to explore male same-sex intimacies, which were gaining increasing visibility in the 1990s Sinophone world. While scholars generally agree that the male dan in Wu’s novel bears considerable resemblance to the figure of the contemporary gay man, some read the ending of Wu’s novel, where the two protagonists, Mei Ziyu and Du Qinyan, part ways, as representing a compromise. I contend that this “unhappy ending” points to Wu’s most radical departure from Chen’s novel. The original novel’s ending, where Ziyu lives happily ever after with both his wife and Qinyan, reaffirms the centrality of the “polygamous” patron-patronized relationship in the late imperial imagination of male-male relations. In contrast, the failed relationship between Ziyu and Qinyan in Wu’s version points to the obsoleteness of the xiangong system, as well as the polygamous mode in the 1990s, which required new modes, categories, and symbols for the imagination of male same-sex relationships. Arguing that in this novel forces past and present, local and global converge, the author uses it to explore the larger question of how to approach the queer Sinophone.]

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.]

He, Xiaopei. “My Fake Wedding: Stirring Up the Tongzhi Movement in China.” Development 52, 1 (2009): 101-104.

Ho, Aaron K. H. “The Lack of Chinese Lesbians: Double Crossing in Blue Gate Crossing.” Genders 49 (2009).

Hubbard, Joshua A. “Queering the New Woman: Ideals of Modern Femininity in The Ladies’ Journal, 1915-1931.” Nannü 16, no. 2 (2014): 341-362.

Huang, Hans Tao-Ming. Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2011.

[Abstract: This book delineates the history and politics of gender and sexuality since postwar Taiwan. Tracking the interface between queerness and national culture, it underscores the imbrications of male homosexuality, prostitution and feminism within the modernizing process and offers a trenchant critique of the violence of sexual modernity.]

Kam, Lucetta Y. L. Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Communities and Politics in Urban China. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2013.

[Abstract: This is the first ethnographic study of lala (lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) communities and politics in China, focusing on the city of Shanghai. Based on several years of in-depth interviews, the volume concentrates on lalas’ everyday struggle to reconcile same-sex desires with a dominant rhetoric of family harmony and compulsory marriage, all within a culture denying women active and legitimate sexual agency. Kam reads discourses on homophobia in China, including the rhetoric of ?Chinese tolerance,? and considers the heteronormative demands imposed on tongzhi subjects. She treats ?the politics of public correctness? as a newly emerging tongzhi practice developed from the culturally specific, Chinese forms of regulation that inform tongzhi survival strategies and self-identification. Alternating between Kam’s own experiences with queer identity and her extensive ethnographic findings, this text offers a contemporary portrait of female tongzhi communities and politics in urban China, making an invaluable contribution to global discussions and international debates on same-sex intimacies, homophobia, coming-out politics, and sexual governance.]

Kang, Wenqing. Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900-1950. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009.

—–. “Male Same-Sex Relations in Modern China: Language, Media Representations, Law, 1900-1949.” positions: east asia cultures critque 18, 2 (Fall 2010): 498-510.

—–. ” The Decriminalization and Depathologization of Homosexuality in China.” In Timothy B. Weston and Lionel M. Jensen, eds., China In and Beyond the Headlines. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012, 231-248.

—–. “Seeking Pleasure in Peril: Male Same-Sex Relations during the Cultural Revolution.” positions: asia critique 30, 1 (Feb. 2022): 61-84.

Kong, Travis S. K. Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong Unspoken but Unforgotten. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.

[Abstract: “This is very personal and private, but I’ve told you everything.” Old Chan thus gives voice to the attitude expressed in all thirteen stories told in this intimate oral history of life at the margins of Hong Kong society, stories punctuated by laughter, joy, happiness, and pride, as well as tears, anger, remorse, shame, and guilt. Illustrated with photos, letters, and other images, Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong: Unspoken but Unforgotten gives voice to the complexities of a “secretive” past with unique hardships as these men came to terms with their sexuality, adulthood, and a colonial society. The men talk with equal candour about how their sexuality remains a complication as they negotiate failing health, ageing, and their current role in society. While fascinating as life histories, these stories also add insight to the theoretical debates surrounding identity and masculinity, coming out, ageing and sexuality, and power and resistance. Confined within the heteronormative culture prescribed by government, family, and religion, these men have lived the whole of their lives struggling to find their social role, challenging the distinction between public and private, and longing for a stable homosexual relationship and a liberating homosexual space in the face of deteriorating health and a youth obsessed gay community.]

Lauvin, Maud, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao, eds. Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2017. [MCLC Resource Center review by Shana Ye]

[Abstract: Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer in this digital, globalist age. The title of this pioneering volume . . . already gives an idea of the colorful, multifaceted realms the fans inhabit today. Contributors to this collection situate the proliferation of (often online) queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires as a reaction against the norms in discourses surrounding nation-states, linguistics, geopolitics, genders, and sexualities. Moving beyond the easy polarities between general resistance and capitulation, Queer Fan Cultures explores the fans’ diverse strategies in negotiating with cultural strictures and media censorship. It further outlines the performance of subjectivity, identity, and agency that cyberspace offers to female fans. Presenting a wide array of concrete case studies of queer fandoms in Chinese-speaking contexts, the essays in this volume challenge long-established Western-centric and Japanese-focused fan scholarship by highlighting the significance and specificities of Sinophone queer fan cultures and practices in a globalized world. The geographic organization of the chapters illuminates cultural differences and the other competing forces shaping geocultural intersections among fandoms based in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.]

Leung, Helen Hok-Sze. “Thoughts on Lesbian Genders in Contemporary Chinese Cultures.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 6, 2 (Summer 2002): 123-133.

—–. “Notes on Sexual Dissidence in Hong Kong and Taiwan.” West Coast Line 33, vol. 34, no.3 (Winter 2001): 8-26.

—–. Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008.

[Abstract: Leung explores Hong Kong cultural productions–cinema, fiction, popular music and subcultural projects–and argues that while there is no overt consolidation of gay and lesbian identities in Hong Kong culture, undercurrents of diverse and complex expressions of gender and sexual variance are widely in evidence. ]

Li Yinhe 李银河 and Wang Xiaobo 王小波. Tamen de shijie: Zhongguo nan tongxinglian qunluo toushi 他们的世界中国男同性恋群落透视 (Their world: a look at the Chinese male homosexuality community). Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu youxian gongsi, 1993.

Lin, Song Hwee. Celluloid Comrade: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.

—–. “How to be Queer in Taiwan: Translation, Appropriation, and the Construction of a Queer Identity in Taiwan.” In Fran Martin, Peter Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Audrey Yue, eds., AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2008.

Liou, Liang-Ya. “At the Intersection of the Global and the Local: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Fictions by Pai Hsien-yung [Bai Xianyong], Li Ang, Chu Tien-wen [Zhu Tianwen] and Chi Ta-wei [Ji Dawei].” Postcolonial Studies 6, 2 (2010): 191-206.

Liu, Petrus. “Why Does Queer Theory Need China?” positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 2 (2010): 291-320.

—–. The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. [MCLC Resource Center review by Wenqing Kang]

Liu, Petrus and Lisa Rofel, eds. Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics. Special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 2 (Fall 2010).

Liu, Yixin. “Female Same-Sex Love in the Chinese Enlightenment: Lesbian Fiction by Three Women Writers, 1923-28.” In Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds. Queer Literature in the Sinosphere. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, 83-100.

Martin, Fran. “Surface Tensions: Reading Productions of Tongzhi in Contemporary Taiwan.” GLQ 6, 1 (2000): 61-86.

—–. “Introduction.” In Martin, ed., Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003, 1-28.

—–. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representations in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. HK: University of Hong Kong Press, 2003.

—–. Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

[Abstract: reveals that the passionate love one woman feels for another occupies a position of unsuspected centrality in contemporary Chinese mass cultures. By examining representations of erotic and romantic love between women in popular films, elite and pulp fiction, and television dramas, Fran Martin shows how youthful same-sex love is often framed as a universal, even ennobling, feminine experience. She argues that a temporal logic dominates depictions of female homoeroticism, and she traces that logic across texts produced and consumed in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. Attentive to both transnational cultural flows and local particularities, Martin shows how loving relations between women in mass culture are usually represented as past experiences. Adult protagonists revel in the repeated, mournful narration of their memories. Yet these portrayals do not simply or finally consign the same-sex loving woman to the past–they also cause her to reappear ceaselessly in the present. As Martin explains, memorial schoolgirl love stories are popular throughout contemporary Chinese cultures. The same-sex attracted young woman appears in both openly homophobic and proudly queer-affirmative narratives, as well as in stories whose ideological valence is less immediately clear. Martin demonstrates that the stories, television programs, and films she analyzes are not idiosyncratic depictions of marginal figures, but manifestations of a broader, mainstream cultural preoccupation. Her investigation of representations of same-sex love between women sheds new light on contemporary Chinese understandings of sex, love, gender, marriage, and the cultural ordering of human life.]

—–. “Utopian Yearning: Reconstructing China’s Queer Cultural Histories.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12, 1 (2011): 132-38.

Martin, Fran, Peter Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Audrey Yue, eds., AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2008.

Moran, Thomas. “Same-Sex Love in Recent Chinese Literature.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 488-95.

—–. “Homoeroticism in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 336-44.

Ng, How Wee. “Queer Singapore Chinese Theatre: Staging Homosexuality, AIDS and Familial Acceptance.” In Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds. Queer Literature in the Sinosphere. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, 221-44.

Payne, Christopher. “Queer Otherwise: Anti-Sociality in Wuhe’s Gui’er and Ayao.” Archiv orientální 81, 3 (2013): 539-554.

Parry, Amie and Liu Jen-peng. “The Politics of Schadenfreude: Violence and Queer Cultural Critique in Lucifer Hung’s Science Fiction.” positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 2 (Fall 2010): 351-372.

Picerni, Federico. “The Public Dimension of Homosexual(S) Dwelling in the Sinosphere: Parks in Pai Hsien-Yung’s Crystal Boys and Mu Cao’s Poems.” Between: Journal of the Italian Association for the Theory and Comparative History of Literature 14, no. 28 (2024): 235-53.

Rofel, Lisa. “The Traffic in Money Boys.” positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 2 (Fall 2010): 425-58.

Sang, Tze-lan Deborah. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-sex Desire in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. Ph. D. diss (Comp Lit). Berkeley: University of California. 1996.

—–. “Translating Homosexuality: The Discourse of Tongxing’ai in Republican China (1912-1949).” In Lydia Liu, ed., Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham: Duke UP, 1999, 276-304.

—–. “Lesbian Feminism in the Mass-Mediated Public Sphere of Taiwan.” In Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 132-61.

—–. “At the Juncture of Censure and Mass Voyeurism: Narratives of Female Homoerotic Desire in Post-Mao China.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, no. 4 (2002).

—–. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Shi, Liang. “Mirror Rubbing: A Critical Genealogy of Pre-Modern Chinese Female Same-Sex Eroticism.” Journal of Homosexuality 60, 5 (2013): 750-772.

Sieber, Patricia. “Introduction.” In Sieber, ed. Red is Not the Only Color: Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex between Women, Collected Stories. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001, 1-36.

Stenberg, Josh. “Troubling Others: Anxiety about Homosexuality in 1990s Australian Sinophone Fiction.” In Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds. Queer Literature in the Sinosphere. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, 135-50.

Tian, Xi. “Homosexualizing ‘Boys Love’ in China: Reflexivity, Genre Transformation, and Cultural Interaction.” Prism 17, 1 (March 2020): 104–126.

[Abstract: Originating in Japan, “boys love” (BL) manga and fiction that focus on romantic or homoerotic male-male relationships are considered by most of their writers, readers, and scholars to be primarily by women and for women and are purposely differentiated from gay fiction and manga by both commentators and practitioners. However, BL’s increasing interweaving with homosexuality and sexual minorities in China requires scholars to reread and redefine BL practice in its Chinese context. This article discusses some of the recent transformations of the BL genre in China, examines the significant role female practitioners have played in indigenizing BL, and ultimately points to the trend of consciously writing and reading BL through a homosexual lens. By reflexively constructing “gayness” in BL works, these practices have also created a peer-led educational space on nonnormative sexuality and gender identity. The author also examines how BL “poaches” official and mainstream cultures, resulting in their considering BL the primary fictional vehicle of homosexuality. She therefore suggests that the trend of conflating BL with homosexuality and the deliberate homosexualization of BL in both texts and real life have ultimately extended the cultural identity of BL, as well as its political meaning, and in practice have created a porous culture that welcomes gender diversity and helps increase the visibility of the gay community, revealing a significant social and cultural shift that cannot be ignored or reversed.]

Wang, Dylan K. “‘An Ideal Woman’: Cross-Dressing and Male Homoerotic Desire in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds. Queer Literature in the Sinosphere. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, 43-62.

Wong, Alvin K. “Queer Sinophone Literature in Hong Kong: The Politics of Worldliness.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 133-44.

Yue, Audrey and Jun Zubillago-Pow. Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2013.

[Abstract: Singapore remains one of the few countries in Asia that has yet to decriminalise homosexuality. Yet it has also been hailed by many as one of the emerging gay capitals of Asia. This book accounts for the rise of mediated queer cultures in Singapore?s current milieu of illiberal citizenship. This collection analyses how contemporary queer Singapore has emerged against a contradictory backdrop of sexual repression and cultural liberalisation. Using the innovative framework of illiberal pragmatism, established and emergent local scholars and activists provide expansive coverage of the impact of homosexuality on Singapore?s media cultures and political economy, including law, religion, the military, literature, theatre, photography, cinema, social media and queer commerce. It shows how new LGBT subjectivities have been fashioned through the governance of illiberal pragmatism, how pragmatism is appropriated as a form of social and critical democratic action, and how cultural citizenship is forged through a logic of queer complicity that complicates the flows of oppositional resistance and grassroots appropriation.]

Zhao, Jamie J. “Perverse Lesbianism: BDSM, Rape and Incest in Cyber Chinese Girls’ Love Fanfics.” In Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds. Queer Literature in the Sinosphere. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, 117-33.

Zheng, Tiantian. Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Zhu, Ying. “Chinese Comrade Literature.” In David Gerstner, ed., International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture – Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transexual Cultures. London: Routledge: 2006.

Migrant Workers and Subalternity (compiled by Maghiel van Crevel)

ALR editors. “Farewell, Picun! On the Closing of China’s Museum of Working Culture and Art.” Asian Labour Review: A Journal for Labour Movements Across Asia (May 19, 2023). [A brief report on the closing of the museum, followed by an English translation of a 2011 Chinese-language interview with Sun Heng, published in Dangdai yishu yu touzi 当代艺术与投资]

Astrauskas, Balys. “Grassroots-Government Interactions in the Literary Field: The Dagong Poets’ Community of the Pearl River Delta, China.” MA thesis. Leiden University, 2018.

Bao, Hongwei. “Queering the Global South: Mu Cao and His Poetry.” In Russell West-Pavlov, ed., The Global South and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 185–97.

———. “The Forgotten Critical Realism: Reification of Desire in Mu Cao’s Poetry.” In Bao, Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Popular Culture under Postsocialism. London: Routledge, 2020, 125–136.

Berry, Chris and Lisa Rofel. “Alternative Archive: China’s Independent Documentary Culture.” In The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. In Chris Berry, Lü Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel, eds. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010, 117–34.

Berry, Michael and Travis Fan. “Ethics and Experience in the Making of Still Tomorrow: In Conversation with Travis Fan.” Chinese Literature Today 7, 2 (2018): 18–23. [On Fan Jian 范剑 and Yu Xiuhua 余秀华.]

Chambers, Harlan. “The ‘Liang Village Series’: Postsocialist Dynamics of Liang Hong’s Rural Investigation.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, 2 (2019): 249–92.

Chan, Bernice. “The Musician Who Became a Champion of Migrant Workers.” South China Morning Post, July 1, 2014. [On Sun Heng 孙恒 and the Picun Migrant Workers Home]

Chang, Cheng and Yun Chan Liao. “Song of Exile, Four-Way Voice: The Blood-and-Sweat Writings of Southeast Asian Migrants in Taiwan.” In Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 440–55.

Chen, Jide. “Subaltern Writing in Twenty-First-Century Chinese Avant-Garde Theater.” Tr. Nienyuan Cheng. Chinese Literature Today, 8, 2 (2019): 52–57.

Chen, Jing. “Neoliberal Intimacy: Verse of Chinese Migrant Workers.” International Center for Cultural Studies working paper no. 5 (2019).

“Chinese Women Migrant Workers’ Literature.” Special section of Chinese Literature Today 10, 2 (2021): 46-127.

Chiu, Kuei-fen and Tsai Yu-yueh. “Two Migration Documentaries from Taiwan.” In Kuei-fen Chiu, Dafydd Fell, and Lin Ping, eds., Migration to and from Taiwan. London: Routledge, 2014, 112–24.

Chiu, Kuei-fen and Yingjin Zhang. “Migration Documentaries and the Vision of Cosmopolitanism.” In Chiu and Zhang, New Chinese-Language Documentaries: Ethics, Subject and Place. New York: Routledge, 2017, 153–67. [On documentary-making in Taiwan, with a case study of Tsai Tsung-lung / Cai Zonglong 蔡崇隆]

Chumley, Lily. “New Socialist Realisms.” In Chumley, Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 93–121.

Cliff, Tom and Wang Kan. “Survival as Citizenship, or Citizenship as Survival? Imagined and Transient Political Groups in Urban China.” In Tom Cliff, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, and Wei Shuge, eds., The Living Politics of Self-Help Movements in East Asia. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, 29–55. [On the Picun Migrant Workers Home]

Connery, Christopher. “New Workers’ Culture: An Interview with Xu Duo.” boundary 2 46, 2 (2019): 255–62. [On various projects by the Picun Migrant Workers Home, mostly music]

———. “World Factory.” Made in China 5, 1 (2020): 136–45 and 224. [On the Grass Stage 草台班 theater group]

Connery, Christopher and Lennet Daigle. “Introduction.” boundary 2 46, 2 (2019): 219–20. [to section called “Artists on the Margins” including work by and on Zhao Chuan’s 赵川 theater and Xu Duo’s 许多 music and lyrics]

Dooling, Amy. “Representing Dagongmei (Female Migrant Workers) in Contemporary China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, 1 (2017): 133–56. [With case studies on Wang Lili 王丽丽 and Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼.]

Ehrenwirth, Rebecca. “Living in/with Ambiguity: Passing in Mu Cao’s In the Face of Death We Are All Equal.” In Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds., Queer Literature in the Sinosphere. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, 151-68.

Eschenburg, Madeline. “Fixing Identities: The Use of Migrant Workers in Chinese Performance Art.” Yishu 16, 3 (2017): 26–36.

—–. Migrating Subjects: The Problem of the ‘Peasant’ in Contemporary Chinese Art. PhD diss. University of Pittsburgh, 2018 [Includes extensive treatment of art made on, and with, migrant workers]

Florence, Éric. “Debates and Classification Struggles Regarding the Representation of Migrants Workers.” China Perspectives 65 (2006). [Mostly on news media but includes reference to literature]

———. “Rural Migrant Workers in Independent Films: Representations of Everyday Agency.” Made in China 3, 1 (2018): 96–103, 119

———. “Struggling around the Politics of Recognition: The Formation of Communities of Interpretations and of Emotions among a Collective of Migrant Workers in Twenty-First-Century China.” In Vanessa Frangville and Gwennaël Gaffric, eds., China’s Youth Cultures and Collective Spaces: Creativity, Sociality, Identity and Resistance. London: Routledge, 2020, 170–86. [On art and culture in various media, with a case study of the Picun Migrant Workers Home.]

———. “The Cultural Politics of Labour in Postsocialist China: The Case of Rural Migrant Workers.” In Kevin Latham, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Culture and Society. London: Routledge, 2020, 212–30.

Florence, Eric and Junxi Qian. “‘Make Contributions and Offer Your Youth for Tomorrow’s Dream’: The Establishment of the Shenzhen Migrant Worker Museum.” In Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace (eds), Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour. London / New York: Verso, 2022, 598-606.

Fu, Qiuyun. “My Impression of Picun.” Tr. Ping Zhu. World Literature Today (Spring, 2021): 32.

Gaetano, Arianne. “Rural Woman and Modernity in Globalizing China: Seeing Jia Zhangke’s The World.” Visual Anthropology Review 25, 1 (2009): 25–39.

Garbelli, Matteo. “Poetry and Labour(s): Chinese Workers’ Poetry from the Cultural Revolution to the Twenty-First Century.” Annali di Ca’ Foscari: Serie Orientale 59 (2023): 357–392.

Gohara, Nobuyuki. “Migrant Workers in Taiwan Put Pen to Paper.” Nikkei Asian Review (Feb. 5, 2019).

Gong, Haomin. “Toward a New Leftist Ecocriticism in Postsocialist China: Reading the ‘Poetry of Migrant Workers’ as Ecopoetry.” In Wang Ban and Lu Jie, eds., China and the New Left: Political and Cultural Interventions. Lanham: Lexington, 2012, 139–57.

———. “Ecopoetics in the Dagong Poetry in Postsocialist China: Nature, Politics, and Gender in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poems.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 25, 2 (2018): 257–79.

Gong, Haomin. “Gender, Class, and Capital: Female Migrant Workers’ Writing in Postsocialist China and Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry.” Chinese Literature Today 10, 2 (2021): 58-76.

Goodman, Eleanor. “Translating Migrant Worker Poetry: Whose Voices Get Heard and How?” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, 2 and 15, 1 (double issue) (2017): 107–27.

———. “Poetry, Translation, and Labor.” In Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs, edited by Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein, 45–68. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. [With case studies of Wang Xiaoni 王小妮, Zang Di 藏棣, Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼.]

—–. “‘In the Roar of the Machines’: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry of Witness and Resistance.” Chinese Literature Today 10, 2 (2021): 77-87.

Gullotta, Diego and Lili Lin. “Grass Stage as Method: (Un)doing Cultural Studies in China.” Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 2 (2022): 54–79. [On grassroots theater by and about migrant workers among other things.]

Guo Ting. “How Fan Yusu Wrote Dignity Back into Migrants’ Lives.” Los Angeles Review of Books blog (June 7, 2017).

He Shan and John Sexton. “Migrant Workers Tell Their Story in New Museum.” China.Org (Nov. 7, 2008).

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Ragpicking as Method.” Prism 16, 2 (2019): 260–97 [On visual art and film, with special attention to Wang Jiuliang 王久良]

—–. On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China. Columbia University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: With case studies of on “fractious cultural forms” such as (delegated) performance art, film and visual art, poetry and human-interest journalism, “suicide shows” (where precarious workers threaten to publicly end their lives in protest at the injustice they face), and social media.]

Hinderer, Max Jorge and Matthijs de Bruijne. “Cultural Revolution from Below?” Linksnet (September 6, 2010). [Interview with Sun Heng 孙恒 on the Picun Migrant Workers Home]

Ho, Olivia. “Migrant Workers, Migrant Writers.” The Straits Times (April 28, 2020). [On migrant worker literature in Singapore. Scroll down for a list of publications.]

Huang, Chuanhui. “Picun Village Culture.” In Huang, Migrant Workers and the City: Generation Now. Tr. Anna Beare. Blackpoint, NS: Fernwood, 2016, 93–135.

Huerta, Elise and Hangping Xu. “Yu Xiuhua.” Chinese Literature Today 7, 2 (2018): 4–5.

Hung, Celina Tzu-hui. “The Promise and Peril of Translation in the Taiwan Literature Award for Migrants.” In Andrea Bachner, Howard Chiang, and Yu-lin Lee, eds., Sinoglossia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023, 173-99.

Hunt, Pamela. “Drifting Through the Capital: ‘Floating’ Migrants and Masculinity in Xu Zechen’s Fiction.” Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies 6 (2016): 1–34.

Inwood, Heather. “Between License and Responsibility: Reexamining the Role of the Poet in Twenty-First-Century Chinese Society.” Chinese Literature Today 2, 1 (2011): 49–55.

Iovene, Paola, ed. Cultures of Labor in Contemporary China, special issue of positions: asia critique 31, 2 (2023).

Iovene, Paola and Federico Picerni. 2022. “Chinese Workers’ Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Literature

Jacka, Tamara. “‘My Life as a Migrant Worker’: Women in Rural–Urban Migration in Contemporary China.” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 4 (2000).

—–. “Migrant Women’s Stories.” In Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, eds., On the Move: Women and Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 279–85. [see here for an earlier, more extensive edition of this essay]

Jaguścik, Justyna. “Cultural Representation and Self-Representation of Dagongmei in Contemporary China.” DEP 17 (2011): 121–38. [On television and literature, with special attention to Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼]

—–. Literary Body Discourses: Body, Gender and Class in Contemporary Chinese Female-Authored Literature. PhD diss. University of Zürich, 2014.

—–. “‘The Woman Attempting to Disrupt the Ritual’: Representations of Femininity and the Poetics of the Subaltern Body in Contemporary Chinese Female-Authored Poetry.” Harvard Asia Quarterly XVI, 3 (2014): 60–71. [With case studies of Lü Yue 吕约, Zhai Yongming 翟永明, and Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼]

———. “Feminist Responses to the Anthropocene: Voices from China.” International Communication of Chinese Culture 5 (2018): 83–100. [With case studies of Zhai Yongming 翟永明 and Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼]

———. “Intersections of Class, Gender and Environmental Concern in Contemporary Chinese Poetry: Zheng Xiaoqiong and Her Writing from Below.” In Joanna Frużyńska, ed., Kobieta w oczach kobiet. Kobiece (auto)narracje w perspektywie transkulturowej (Woman in the Eyes of Women: Women’s (Auto)Narratives in a Transcultural Perspective). Warsaw: University of Warsaw Press, 2019, 244–54.

—–. “Daizō Sakurai’s Tent Theater, Picun, and the Reenchantment of Urban Space.” positions: asia critique 31, 2 (2023): 357–378.

Jakimów, Małgorzata. “Resistance through Accommodation: A Citizenship Approach to Migrant Worker NGOs in China.” Journal of Contemporary China 26, issue 108 (2017): 915-930 [includes case study of the Picun Migrant Workers Home]

Jian Yi (dir). “Ein Theater von Wanderarbeitern, für Wanderarbeiter” (A Theater of Migrant Workers, for Migrant Workers). Goethe Institute, 2018. [On the Picun Migrant Workers Home; click “cc” in the blue ribbon for switching Mandarin subtitles on/off]

Kaur-Nagpal, Upneet (dir). “Poets on Permits—A Documentary on Migrant Workers + Poetry in Singapore.” Uptake Media, 2016. [On five finalists of the 2015 Migrant Worker Poetry Competition, from Bangladesh, the Philippines, India, China, and Indonesia]

Kelley, Jeff and Kaz Tsuruta. The Three Gorges Project: Paintings by Liu Xiaodong. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2005.

Khokan, Zakir Hossain. “Waxing Poetic: A Bengali Tale in Singapore.” Social Space 2018/1: 47–51.

Klein, Lucas. “Mediation Is Our Authenticity: Dagong Poetry and the Shijing in Translation.” In Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein, eds., Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019, 201–24.

Kochan, Dror. “Visual Representation of Internal Migration and Social Change in China.” China Information 23, 2 (2009): 285–316.

Koetse, Manya. “Behind the Rise and Fade of China’s Literary Sensation Fan Yusu.” What’s on Weibo (May 31, 2017).

Kunze, Rui. “Writing Workers in Post-Socialist China: Migrant Worker Poetry and Its New left Reception.” Oriens Extremus 57 (2018): 145–169.

Kuo, Jia. “Migrant Workers Home and Its Practices on Shaping the Culture and Community of ‘New Working Class’: A Criticism on Cultural-Political Activism in Contemporary China.” Cultural Studies 1, 6 (2017): 941-967.

Li, Cheng. “Migrant Worker Bildungsroman: The Promises and Pitfalls of Coming of Age in Chinese Migrant Workers’ Writings.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 54, 3-4 (2023): 95-105.

[Abstract: This essay argues that Chinese migrant worker writers reflect their visions of individual subjectivity, socio-political dynamics, and nationhood by employing the coming-of-age narrative in their semi-autographical or autobiographical writings to recount their adaptation to urban environments. The essay examines two distinct avenues to achieving maturity—a process of active adaptation through social realism portrayed in Zhou Shuheng’s Zhongguoshi mingong (Chinese Migrant Workers), and passive adjustment through inner monologue or psychological realism in Wang Ershi’s “Fairy Couple” (“Tianxianpei”). Importantly, this essay attempts to move beyond purely literary representations by examining the poignant dilemmas that Chinese migrant workers face as they mature in their professional lives. While their autobiographical accounts offer a glimpse into the unique struggles of migrant workers, the ambivalent identities of these writers as both laborers and authors in the real world reveal the inherent limitations of the powerless in China.]

Li, Dian. “Yu Xiuhua: Traveling through the Mud of Life by Poetry.” Asia Dialogue (Dec. 6, 2017).

———. “Yu Xiuhua: A Life Lived in Poetry.” World Literature Today 92, 4 (2018): 26–29.

Li, Jie. “Filming Power and the Powerless: Zhao Liang’s Crime and Punishment (2007) and Petition (2009).” In Zhen Zhang and Angela Zito, eds., DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015, 76–96.

Li, Yanwen. “Negotiating Class and the Rural–Urban Divide in Urban Homes: Configuring the Maid in Literature and Popular Culture.” In Wanning Sun and Ling Yang, eds., Love Stories in China: The Politics of Intimacy in the Twenty-First Century. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020, 97–112.

Li, Yun and Rong Rong. “A Middle-Class Misidentification: Self-Identification in the Autobiographical Poetry of Chinese Female Migrant Workers.” positions: asia critique 27, 4 (2019): 773–98.

Li, Yunlei. “Subaltern Literature: Theory and Practice (2004–2009).” Tr. by Adrian Thieret. In Cao Tianyu, Zhong Xueping, Liao Kebin, and Ban Wang, eds., Culture and Social Transformations: Theoretical Framework and Chinese Context. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 51–70.

———. “The Rise of ‘Subaltern Literature in the Twenty-First Century: A Speech at the Utopia Forum (2007).” Tr. Mu Aili. In Xueping Zhong and Ban Wang, eds., Debating the Socialist Legacy and Capitalist Globalization in China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 165-82.

Lian Zhiying and Gillian Oliver. “Sustainability of Independent Community Archives in China: A Case Study.” Archival Science 18, 4 (2018): 313–32. [On the Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Art at the Picun Migrant Workers Home.]

Liu, Fei. “Pi Village, with Occasional Music: Notes on the New Workers Art Troupe.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 19, 3 (2018): 419-430.

Liu, Jin. “The Rhetoric of Local Languages as the Marginal: Chinese Underground and Independent Films by Jia Zhangke and others.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, 2 (2006): 163–205.

Lu, Qianwen. “Taking Action against Apathy.” Global Times (May 6, 2013). (On Liang Hong 梁鸿.)

Lu, Tonglin. “Fantasy and Reality of a Virtual China in Jia Zhangke’s Film The World.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2, 3 (2008): 163–79.

Lü, Tu. “Village Songs and the Building of Community Culture: A Talk.” Translated, edited, and annotated by Siting Jiang. positions: asia critique 31, 2 (2023): 485–506.

Ma, Junyan. 2021. “Fan Yusu after the Big Sensation.” Shorthand. n.d. [Includes a spoken autobiographical essay with English subtitles.]

—–. “The Sound of Chinese Migrant Workers.” Sixth Tone (April 6, 2022). [On three members of the Picun Literature Group: Fan Yusu, Xu Liangyuan, and Xiao Hai. Text and video.]

Marinelli, Maurizio. “Urban Revolution and Chinese Contemporary Art: A Total Revolution of the Senses.” China Information 29, 2 (2015): 154–75.

Mei, Ruo. “China’s 35M Domestic Workers, Silent No More.” Sixth Tone (July 22, 2020). [On the role of culture in advocacy, including music and poetry workshops]

Mendoza, Sherwin. “Singapore Migrant Worker Poetry, Worker Resistance, and International Solidarity.” Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus 17, 14/3 (July 15, 2019).

Meng Fanhua. “The New Literature of the People: A Perspective on the Contemporary Chinese Literary Experience.” Tr. Ronald Kimmons. Chinese Literature Today 1, 1 (2010): 37–40.

Mintarsih, Adriana Rahajeng. “Facebook, Polymedia, Social Capital, and a Digital Family of Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers: A Case Study of the Voice of Singapore’s Invisible Hands.” Migration, Mobility, & Displacement 4, 1 (2019): 66–83. [On migrant worker writing in Singapore]

Nan, Fan. “A Difficult Breakthrough: On Representing Subaltern Experiences.” In Xueping Zhong and Ban Wang, eds., Debating the Socialist Legacy and Capitalist Globalization in China. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 183–204.

Nowak, Mark. “Emerging Solidarities.” In Nowak, Social Poetics. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2020, 231–56. [On Chinese migrant worker poetry, with special attention to labor relations.]

Nunes, Jenn Marie. “Sitting with Discomfort: A Queer-Feminist Approach to Translating Yu Xiuhua.” In Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein, eds., Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019, 23–43.

Pai, Hsiao-hung. Scattered Sand: The Story of China’s Rural Migrants. London: Verso, 2012. [With regular references to poetry and other cultural production by migrant workers]

Parke, Elizabeth. “Migrant Workers and the Imaging of Human Infrastructure in Chinese Contemporary Art.” China Information 29, 2 (2015): 226–52.

———. “Out of Service: Migrant Workers and Public Space in Beijing.” In Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang, eds., Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 261–84.

Perini, Gaia. “Operai in Cina. Un film di Song Yi” (Workers in China: A Movie by Song Yi), Gli asini 41. Republished on Communia Network, October 11, 2017. [On independent cinema, Fan Yusu 范雨素 and the Picun Migrant Workers Home]

Phillips, Tom and Wang Zhen. “‘I Am Fan Yusu’: China Gripped by Dickensian Tale of a Migrant Worker’s Struggle.” The Guardian (May 3, 2017).

Picerni, Federico. “A Journey into the City: Migrant Workers’ Relation with the Urban Space and Struggle for Existence in Xu Zechen’s Early jingpiao Fiction.” Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale 55 (2019): 449–72.

—–. “Fragile and Powerful: Chinese Migrant Women, Body and Violence in Sheng Keyi’s Bei mei.” In Nicoletta Pesaro and Alice Favaro, eds., Viajes y escrituras: migraciones y cartografias de la violencia, (Travels and Writings: Migrations and Cartographies of Violence). Paris: Colloquia, 2019, 145–64.

—–. “Strangers in a Familiar City: Picun Migrant-Worker Poets in the Urban Space of Beijing.” International Quarterly for Asian Studies 51, 1/2 (2020): 147–70.

—–. “A Proletarian Nora: Discussing Fan Yusu.” Made in China 5(1) (2020): 125–29 and 221–22.

—–. “Metamorfosi operaie. Corpo e alienazione in alcuni poeti operai cinesi“(Workers’ Metamorphoses: Body and Alienation in Chinese Worker Poets). Sinosfere 9 (2020): 6–20.

—–. The Aesthetics of Labour: Social and Textual Practice of the Picun Literature Group. PhD diss. Università Ca’Foscari Venezia and Universität Heidelberg, 2022.

—–. “From the Periphery of Literature: Marginal Urban Lives and Recognition(s) in the Picun Literature Group.” In Emily Williams and Loredana Cesarino, eds., China from the Margins: New Narratives of Past and Present. Routledge, 2024, 137-53.

Pozzana, Claudia. “Poetry.” In Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere, eds., Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi. Canberra: Australia National University Press, 2019, 189–96.

Qian, Junxi and Guo Junwan’guo. “Migrant on Exhibition: The Emergence of Migrant Worker Museums in China as a Neoliberal Experiment on Governance.” Journal of Urban Affairs (Jan. 2, 2018).

Qian, Junxi and Éric Florence. “Migrant Worker Museums in China: Public Cultures of Migrant Labor in State and Grassroots Initiatives.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, special issue on new theoretical dialogues on migration in China, 2020. DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1739373

Qin, Xiaoyu. “Remembering the Anonymous.” In Qin Xiaoyu, ed., Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry. Tr. Eleanor Goodman. Buffalo: White Pine Press, 2016, 15–31.

Qiu, Jack Linchuan and Wang Hongzhe. “Working-Class Cultural Spaces: Comparing the Old and the New.” In Beatriz Carrillo and David Goodman, ed., China’s Peasants and Workers: Changing Class Identities. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018, 124–46. [On performing arts, taken broadly, including poetry readings; and exhibitions and museums]

Rampolla, Giulia. “Dalle lusinghe del capitalismo al disincanto della transizione: breve introduzione alla narrativa delle classi subalterne” (From the Lure of Capitalism to the Disillusionment of Transition: A Brief Introduction to Fiction of the Subaltern Classes). In Tommaso Pellin and Giorgio Trentin, ed., Associazione Italiana di Studi Cinesi. Atti del XV convegno 2015. Venice: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2017, 277–88.

Rauhala, Emily. “The Poet Who Died for Your Phone.” Time (June 2015). [On Xu Lizhi 许立志]

Riep, Steven L. “Body, Disability, and Creativity in the Poetry of Yu Xiuhua.” Chinese Literature Today 7, 2 (2018): 32–41.

Rojas, Carlos. “The World Besiegd by Waste: On Garbage, Recycling, and Sublimation.” In Kwai-Cheung Lo and Jessica Yeung, eds., Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene: Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change. Singapore: Springrer Singapore, 2019. 21-36.

Sang, Qiu. “A Miner’s Verse: Through Peril and Pain, Just Words Remain.” Sixth Tone (Nov. 3, 2021). [On Chen Nianxi]

Sang, Tze-lan and Rui Shen. “The Body as a Room of Her Own: A Dialog on Yu Xiuhua.” Chinese Literature Today 7, 2 (2018): 24–31.

Sarkar, Sonia. “Poetry of the Proletarians.” LiveMint (August 16, 2019). [On migrant worker writing in Singapore]

Schaefer, William. “Poor and Blank: History’s Marks and the Photographies of Displacement.” Representations 109, 1 (2010): 1–34.

Schaffer, Kay and Xianlin Song. “Silence and the Silenced: Literary Renderings of Rural Women’s Lives in and beyond China—Lin Bai, Sheng Keyi and Xinran.” In Schaffer and Song, Women Writers in Postsocialist China. London: Routledge, 2014, 53–76.

Schultz, Corey Kai Nelson. “The Peasant and the Mingong: From Empathy to Sympathy to Looking Back.” In Schultz, Moving Figures: Class and Feeling in the Films of Jia Zhangke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 48-83.

Schulz, Yvan. “Plastic China: Beyond Waste Imports.” Made in China 3, 4 (2018): 96–101 and 119–20. [On film, with a case study of Wang Jiuliang 王久良]

Sheng Yun. “Accidental Death of a Poet.” London Review of Books (Nov. 11, 2014). [On Xu Lizhi 许立志.]

Shieh, Simon. “Zheng Xiaoqiong, the Migrant Poet.” SupChina (April 22, 2019).

Sim, Wai Chew. “Super-Diversity and Its Implications in Two Singapore Texts.” In Singapore Literature and Culture: Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts, edited by Angelia Poon and Angus Whitehead, 181–97. New York: Routledge, 2017. [On Claire Tham and Xi Dan 喜蛋]

Sorace, Christian. “Poetry after the Future.” Made in China 5, 1 (2020): 130–35; 222–24.

Steen, Shannon. “World Factory: Theatre, Labor, and China’s ‘New Left’.” Theatre Survey 58, 1 (2017): 24–47.

Steinfeld, Jemimah and Hannah Leung. “Moving towards Inequality.” Index on Censorship 43, 2 (2013): 29–32. [On Liang Hong 梁鸿]

Strittmatter, Kai. “Eine Welt ohne Stimme” (A World without a Voice). Süddeutsche Zeitung (Dec. 14–15, 2013). [On Guo Jinniu 郭金牛]

———. “Der Sprung” (The Jump). Süddeutsche Zeitung (June 21, 2015). [On Xu Lizhi.]

Studer, Stephanie. “How Chinese Factory-Workers Express Their Views on Life: Poems, Videos and Fashion All Speak to Migrants’ Alienation.” The Economist (Aug. 14, 2021).

Sun, Wanning. “Maids in the Televisual City: Competing Tales of Post-Socialist Modernity.” In Ying Zhu, Michael Keane, and Ruoyun Bai, eds., TV Drama in China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008, 89–102.

—–. “Making Space for the Maid: Metropolitan Gaze, Peripheral Vision and Subaltern Spectatorship in Urban China.” Feminist Media Studies 9, 1 (2009): 57–72.

——. Maid in China: Media, Morality, and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries. London: Routledge, 2009.

——. “Sex, City, and the Maid: Between Socialist Fantasies and Neoliberal Parables.” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 39, 4 (2010): 53–69. [On television]

—–. “Narrating Translocality: Dagong Poetry and the Subaltern Imagination.” Mobilities 5, 3 (2010): 291–309.

—–. “Maid as Metaphor: Dagongmei and a New Pathway to Chinese Transnational Capital.” In Radha Sarma Hegde, ed., Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures. New York: New York University Press, 2011, 196–211. [On television]

—–. “Subalternity with Chinese Characteristics: Rural Migrants, Cultural Activism, and Digital Video Filmmaking.” Javnost–the Public 19, 2 (2012): 83–99.

—–. “Screening Inequality: Injustices, Class Identities and Rural Migrants in Chinese Cinema.” Berliner China-Hefte: Chinese History and Society 41 (2012): 6–20.

—–. “Poetry of Labour and (Dis)articulation of Class: China’s Worker-Poets and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries.” Journal of Contemporary China 78 (2012): 993–1010.

—–. “The Poetry of Spiritual Homelessness: A Creative Practice of Coping with Industrial Alienation.” In Andrew B. Kipnis, ed., Chinese Modernity and the Individual Psyche. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012, 67–85.

—–. “Amateur Photography as Self-Ethnography: China’s Rural Migrant Workers and the Question of Digital-Political Literacy.” Media International Australia 145 (2012): 135–44.

——. Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014.

—–. “The Cultural Politics of Recognition: Rural Migrants and Documentary Films in China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 1 (2013): 3–20.

—–. “‘Northern Girls’: Cultural Politics of Agency and South China’s Migrant Literature.” Asian Studies Review 38, 2 (2014): 168–85.

—–. “Public Intimacy: Contestation over Young Chinese Rural Migrants’ Love Life.” Communication and the Public 1, 2 (2016): 263–68. [On photography]

—–. “Cultural Politics of Class: Workers and Peasants as Historical Subjects.” In Yingjie Guo, ed., Handbook on Class and Social Stratification in China. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016, 107–27. [On film]

—–. “Changing Representations of China’s Workers.” Made in China 3, 3 (2018): 42–45 and 113–14. [Mostly on media but with reference to literature and art]

—–. “Romancing the Vulnerable in Contemporary China: Love on the Assembly Line and the Cultural Politics of Inequality.” China Information 32, 1 (2018): 69–87. [On photography and television]

——. “Consumption Plus Love: Inequality, Domestic Utopia, and China’s New politics of the Future.” Modern China 46, 1 (2020): 49–78. [On television]

—–. “Dark Intimacy and the Moral Economy of Sex: Rural Migrants and the Cultural Politics of Transgression.” China Information (October 2020).

[Abstract: It is difficult to conduct ethnographic inquiries into how China’s rural migrant individuals make decisions about their bodies and their sexual capital, and to date there have been few attempts to do so. Equally scant are examinations of the moral, cultural, and political frameworks that rural migrant workers who live in poverty and in the socio-economic margins use to make sense of sexual decisions and choices. This article starts with an ethnographic glimpse into the lives of some sex workers in Shenzhen, and proceeds to analyse a range of texts: a novella, a novel, a cluster of news stories (from both commercial and state media), and a feature story in a popular lowbrow magazine. Pitting these texts against sex workers’ own statements, as well as reading the texts in juxtaposition, brings into sharp relief the contradictions, connections, and coalitions between a range of discursive positions. The analysis suggests that a critical socio-economic framework, rather than a normative framework of transgression, may get us closer to understanding the emotional consequences of inequality. The analysis also demonstrates that for investigations into how inequality shapes intimacy, cultural texts may contain useful ethnographic insights that complement more traditional ethnographic methods.]

—–. “Bearing Witness to History: Dagong Poets from the 1980s to the Present.” In Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace (eds), Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour. London / New York: Verso, 2022, 655-63.

—–. “The Worker-Poet as the Ethnographic Partner: Documenting the Emotional Pain of Rural Migrant Women.” positions: asia critique 31, 2 (2023): 403–429. [Mainly on Zheng Xiaoqiong.]

Svensson, Marina. “Visualising Labour and Labourscapes in China.” Made in China 3, 3 (2018): 56–61 and 117. [On photography]

Svetvilas, Chuleenan. “Made in China: ‘Last Train Home’ Documents the Life of the Migrant Worker.” International Documentary Association, September 6, 2010. [Extensive interview with Fan Lixin 范立欣]

Swanborn, Peter. “Bij te veel stress ga je aan zelfmoord denken” (Too Much Stress Will Make You Think about Suicide). De Volkskrant (June 13, 2015). [Interview with Guo Jinniu 郭金牛]

Tai, Janice. “Inaugural Literature Festival Featuring Works by Migrant Workers Held at the National Library.” The Straits Times (Dec. 22, 2019). [On migrant worker literature in Singapore]

Tamburello, Giusi. “Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry and Chinese Factories: A Mirror of Uneven Development.” Asian Culture 41 (2017): 23–35.

———. Quando la poesia si fa operaia. Lavoratori migranti poeti della Cina contemporanea (When Poetry Makes Itself a Worker’s: China’s Migrant Labor Poets). Rome: Aracne editrice, 2019. [With a case study of Zheng Xiaoqiong]

—–. Lavoratori Migranti Poeti della Cina Contemporanea. Poesie (Migrant worker poets of contemporary China. Poems). Tr. Giusi Tamburello. Rome: Aracne, 2023. [The book includes the translation into Italian of poems by 24 Chinese worker poets with the Chinese original text]

Tan, Charmaine. “Honouring a Plea for Justice with Njo Kong Kie, Creator of Critically-Acclaimed Theatrical Concert I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron.” Folio (March 10, 2023). [an introduction to the concert, which was inspired by Xu Lizhi’s poetry; followed by an interview with Njo Kong Kie].

Tang, Kai. “Social Imaginary and Musical Persuasion in Twenty-First Century China: A Partial Ethnography of ‘Floating’ Migrant Workers.” Ethomusicology Forum 29, 2 (2020): 187-212.

Tatlow, Didi Kirsten. “Author Tells the Story of Poor Chinese Women.” New York Times (April 13, 2011). [On Sheng Keyi 盛可以]

———. “‘The Storm of Reality’: Chinese Poetic Voices from the Lower Tier of Society.” The New York Times (Oct. 24, 2014).

Tharoor, Ishaan. “The Haunting Poetry of a Chinese Factory Worker Who Committed Suicide.” The Washington Post (Nov. 12, 2014). [On Xu Lizhi]

Thelle, Hatla. “Building Their Own Stage: Constructing the New Worker in China.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 5, 2 (2013): 358-379. [On the role of culture and cultural production in identity formation in the Picun Migrant Workers Home, with attention to the New Workers Art Troupe (later renamed the New Workers Band), the journal The New Worker (Xin gongren), the Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Art, and the New Workers Theater among other things]

Ting, Chun Chun. “The ‘Unlikely Writers’ from Picun: Reinventing Literature and Politics at the Migrant Workers Home.” positions: asia critique 31, 2 (2023): 333–355.

van Crevel, Maghiel. “The Cultural Translation of Battlers Poetry (Dagong shige).” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, 2 and 15, 1 (double issue) (2017): 245–86

———. “Tegen het overzicht: de sappelverzen van Xu Lizhi” (Against the well-ordered: the Battlers Poetry of Xu Lizhi). Terras 13 (2017): 38-51.

———. “The Subaltern.” In “Walk on the Wild Side: Snapshots of the Chinese Poetry Scene.” MCLC Resource Center Publication, 2017, paragraphs 98–108.

———. “Misfit: Xu Lizhi and Battlers Poetry.” Prism: Theory and Chinese Literature 16, 1 (2019): 85–114.

———. “Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry.” Chinese Literature Today 8, 1 (2019): 127–45. [Includes discussion of the Picun Migrant Workers home and of migrant worker museums]

———. ‘Poëzie van de lopende band: Xiaohai” (Poetry of the Assembly Line: Xiaohai). China2025.nl (June 1, 2020).

———. “Battlers Poetry and Picun Literature: Chinese Poet Xiaohai.” Web lecture, Lyrik in Transition project, Trier University (May 27, 2020).

—–. “China’s Battlers Poetry: Punching Up.” World Literature Today (Spring, 2021): 33–34.

—–. “No One in Control? China’s Battler Poetry.” Comparative Critical Studies 18 (2-3): 165-185.

—–. “China’s Battler Poetry and the Hypertranslatability of Zheng Xiaoqiong.” Web lecture (February 3, 2022). University of Chicago.

—–. “How China’s Labor Migrants Write Poetry in the Workshop of the World.” Jacobin (online) (April 26, 2022).

—–. “Poetry and Subalternity: What Are We Looking For?” Web lecture, University of Zürich, 2022. [Scroll down for the video.]

—–. “China’s Battler Poetry, Zheng Xiaoqiong, and Hypertranslatability.” Prism: Theory and Chinese Literature 20, 1 (2023): 201–224.

—–. “I and We in Picun: The Making of Chinese Poet Xiao Hai.” positions: asia critique 31, 2 (2023): 301–331.

Van der Meulen, Sjoukje. “Documenting China’s Garment Industry: Wang Bing’s Portrayal of Migrant Workers’ Suspended Lives within the Contract Labour System.” Pacific Affairs 94, 2 (June 2021): 371-96.

Voci, Paola. “Lightened (Up) Subaltern Smaller-Screens.” In Voci, China on Video: Smaller-screen Realities. London: Routledge, 2010, 149–170.

———. “Activist Sinology and Accented Documentary: China on the (Italian?) Internet.” Modern Italy 24, 4 (2019): 437–56. [On migrant workers in China and the diaspora]

———. “Can the Creative Subaltern Speak? Dafen Village Painters, van Gogh, and the Politics of ‘True Art.’” Made in China 5, 1: (2020) 104–11; 218–20.

—–. “This Is Not Reality (Ceci n’est pas la réalité): Capturing the Imagination of the People Creativity, the Chinese Subaltern, and Documentary Storytelling.” Global Storytelling 1, 2 (2022).

Walsh, Megan. “China’s Migrant Worker Poetry.” The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus 15 (12-4), June 15, 2017.

—–. “The Chinese Factory Workers Who Write Poems on Their Phones.” Originally published on Literary Hub on May 1, 2017. No longer online there, but archived on the MCLC blog.

Wang, Ban. “Documentary as Haunting of the Real: The Logic of Capital in Blind Shaft.” Asian Cinema 16, 1 (2005): 4–15.

Wang, Dezhi and Chun Chun Ting. 2023. “How to Create a New Workers’ Culture Together: An Interview with Wang Dezhi.” Tr Max Bohnenkamp. positions: asia critique 31, 2 (2023): 507–521.

Wang, Hui. “How Does the Phoenix Achieve Nirvana?” Made in China 5,1 (2020): 94–103; 217–18. [On Xu Bing 徐冰, political art, and labor and subalternity]

Wang, Meiqin. “Advertising the Chinese Dream: Urban Billboards and Ni Weihua’s Documentary Photography.” China Information 29, 2 (2015): 176–201.

——. “Waste, Pollution, and Environmental Activism: Wang Jiuliang and the Power of Documenting” and “From Representation to Collaboration: Wen Fang and Her Participatory Art.” In Wang, Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China: Voices from Below. New York: Routledge, 2019, 53–81; 149–80.

Wang, Vivian. “Deep Underground, a Miner Discovered Poetry in the Toil.” New York Times (November 13, 2021).

Wang, Wei. Media Representations of Migrant Workers in China: Identities and Stances. Bern: Peter Lang, 2017. [On television]

Wang, Xiaoping. Postsocialist Conditions: Ideas and History in China’s “Independent Cinema,” 1998–2008. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

Wang, Yanjie. “Displaced in the Simulacrum: Migrant Workers and Urban Space in The World.” Asian Cinema 22, 1 (2011): 152–69. [On the 2010 World Expo in relation to Jia Zhangke’s 贾樟柯 The World]

———. “Violence, Wuxia, Migrants: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontent in A Touch of Sin.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 2 (2015): 159–72.

———. “Trauma, Migrant Families, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Last Train Home.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42, 1 (2016): 49–72.

Whitehead, Richard Angus. “‘this migrant soul enriches this earth’: Encounter with Migrant Bengali Poetry in Singapore.” Singapore Unbound (June 13, 2017).

Williams, Philip. “Migrant Laborer Subcultures in Recent Chinese Literature: A Communicative Perspective.” Intercultural Communication Studies VIII, 2 (1998): 153–60. [On Zhang Mingyuan 张明媛]

Wong, Winnie Won Yin. Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Wright, Kimberley. “Poetry as Dissensus: Migrant Worker Poets in Postsocialist China.” MA thesis. Indiana University, 2017.

Wu, Hung, ed. Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Xiao, Hui Faye. “Against the Proletarian Modernity: Retrotopic Journey and Precariat Subject in Alternative Youth Literature.” In Xiao, Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twenty-First Century China: Morning Sun in the Tiny Times. London: Routledge, 2020, 57–92. [With case studies of Lu Nei 陆内, Fang Fang 方方, Tang Yihong 唐亦洪, Guo Jinniu 郭金牛, and Xu Lizhi 许立志]

———. “‘I Am Fan Yusu’: Baomu Writing and Grassroots Feminism against the Post-Socialist Patriarchy.” In Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao, eds., Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, forthcoming 2021.

—–. “The Sound of Silence: Chinese Domestic Workers’ Literary Writings.” World Literature Today (Spring, 2021): 38-39.

—–. “Caring for the Small: Gendered Resistance and Solidarity through Chinese Domestic Workers’ Writings.” Chinese Literature Today 10, 2 (2021): 46-57.

Xu, Jian. “Representing Rural Migrant Workers in the City: Experimentalism in Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Close to Paradise and Beijing Bicycle.” Screen 46 (2005): 433–49.

Xu, Ming. “A Heavy Heart Still Beats: One Writer’s Struggle with Helping China’s Rural Areas.” Global Times (April 28, 2015). (On Liang Hong 梁鸿.)

———. “Migrant Workers Use Poetry, Rock ’n’ Roll to Uplift Spirits amid Evictions.” Global Times (Dec. 13, 2017). [On the Picun Migrant Workers Home, with special attention to Xiaohai 小海]

Yang, Lian. “Preface: The Cries of the Voiceless.” In Yang Lian, ed., A Massively Single Number. Tr. Brian Holton. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2015, 1–8. [Anthology of 2012 Artsbj International Chinese Poetry Award material; migrant worker poetry features centrally in Yang’s preface, especially Guo Jinniu 郭金牛]

Yang, Qian. “Urban Strangers: Representations of Migrant Workers in Contemporary Chinese Literature, Film, and Popular Culture.” PhD dissertation. University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014.

Yao, Wei. “Work Hard, Play Hard: Migrant Workers Stage Their Very Own Spring Festival Show.” Beijing Review (Feb. 26, 2015). [On the Picun Migrant Workers Home]

Yeh, Ray and Goh Chiew Tong. “His Double Life as a Construction Worker and a ‘Famous Poet’ in Singapore—and the Price He Paid.” CNA (August 18, 2019). [On Mohd Mukul Hossine]

Yin, Siyuan. “Cultural Production in the Working Class Resistance: Labour Activism, Gender Politics, and Solidarities.” Cultural Studies 34, 3 (2020): 418-441. [On labor activism, cultural production, and gender, with case studies in music, on the New Workers Art Troupe (later renamed the New Workers Band) and Jiu Ye 九野 Folk Band]

Yu, Shi and Francis L. Collins. “Producing Mobility: Visual Narratives of the Rural Migrant Worker in Chinese Television.” Mobilities 13, 1 (2018): 126–41.

Zhang Han. “Picun.” Granta 169 (2024).

Zhang, Huiyu. “New Workers’ Literature.” Tr. Ping Zhu. World Literature Today (Spring, 2021): 31.

—–. “Literature as Medium: The Development and Cultural Space of New Worker Literature.” positions: asia critique 31, 2 (2023): 451–471.

Zhang, Lei Luka. “From Red Scare to Capitalist Showcase: Working-Class Literature from Singapore.” In John Lennon and Magnus Nilsson, ed., Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives, volume II. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2020. [Includes a case study of migrant worker writing]

—–. “The (Un)Making of a Worker Poet: The Case of Md Mukul Hossine and Migrant Worker Writings in Singapore,” Journal of Working-Class Studies 6 (1): 57-73

Zhang, Qinghua. “Who Touches the Iron of the Age: On Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry.” Chinese Literature Today 1, 1 (2010): 31–34.

Zhang, Yu and Calvin Hui. “Postsocialism and Its Narratives: An Interview with Cai Xiang | 蔡翔访谈.” MCLC Resource Center web publications, 2018. [includes discussion of Cai Xiang’s 蔡翔 influential essay “The Subaltern” (底层)]

Zhao, Kiki. “A Chinese Poet’s Unusual Path from Isolated Farm Life to Celebrity.” New York Times (Aug. 18, 2017).

Zheng, Bo. Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China project, n.d. [On music, crosstalk, museums. Not scholarship in the strict sense but art-and-research-driven provision of audiovisual source material; includes section on Picun New Worker Art Troupe and related initiatives]

Zhong, Xueping. “Internationale as Specter: Na’er, ‘Subaltern Literature,’ and Contemporary China’s ‘Left Bank.’” In Ban Wang and Jie Lu, eds., China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012, 101–20. [On Cao Zhenglu 曹征路]

—–. “Class Characteristics of China’s Women’s Liberation and 21st-Century Feminism.” In Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao, eds., Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, edited by Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, forthcoming 2021. [On Cao Zhenglu 曹征路 and Fan Yusu 范雨素]

Zhou, Xiaojing. “Scenes from the Global South in China: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetic Agency for Labor and Environmental Justice.” In Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, eds., Ecocriticism of the Global South. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015, 55–76.

———. “Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poems on the Global Connection to Urbanization and the Plight of Migrant Workers in China.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 2, 1 (2016): 84–96.

———. “‘Slow Violence’ in Migrant Landscapes: ‘Hollow Villages’ and Tourist River Towns in China.” Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24, 2 (2017): 274–91. (With a case study on Zheng Xiaoqiong.)

———. Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Women Migrant Workers. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020.

—–. “Zheng Xiaoqiong (1980-).” In Christopher Lupke and Thomas E. Moran, eds., Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 387: Chinese Poets Since 1949. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2021, 330-36.

———. “Ethical Relations in Migrant Worker Poetry as Testimony.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (Winter 2022).

Zhong, Yurou. “Musica Practica: The Sound of the Beijing New Worker Band.” positions: asia critique 31, 2 (2023): 281–301.

Zhou, Yu. “The Poetry of Suffering.” Global Times (Feb. 6, 2015). [On Yu Xiuhua 余秀华]

Zhu, Ping. “Why Does Workers’ Literature Matter?” World Literature Today (Spring, 2021): 29–30.

Zuccheri, Serena. “La poesia degli operai migranti. Una riconfigurazione della subalternità nella Cina contemporanea” (The Poetry of Migrant Workers: A Reconfiguration of Subalternity in Contemporary China). In Marina Miranda, ed., Politica, società e cultura di una Cina in ascesa. L’amministrazione di Xi Jinping al suo primo mandato (Politics, Society, and Culture of an Ascending China: Xi Jinping’s Administration in His First Term). Roma: Carocci Editore, 2016, 135–49.

Minority, Aboriginal, Indigenous Literature

Bachner, Andrea. “Cultural Margins, Hybrid Scripts: Bigraphism and Translation in Indigenous Taiwanese Writing.” Journal of World Literature 1, 2 (2016): 226-244.

Baranovitch, Nimrod. “Inverted Exile: Uyghur Writers and Artists in Beijing and the Political Implications of their Works.” Modern China 33, 4 (2007): 462-504.

Bender, Mark. “Dying Hunters, Poison Plants, and Mute Slaves: Nature and Tradition in Nuosu Yi Poetry.” Asian Highlands Perspectives 1 (2009): 117-158.

—–. “Echoes from Si gang lih: Burao Yilu’s ‘Moon Mountain.'” Asian Highlands Perspectives 10 (2011): 99-128.

—–. “Cry of the Silver Pheasant: Contemporary Ethnic Poetry in Sichuan and Yunnan.” Chinese Literature Today 2, 2, (2012).

—–. “Ethnographic Poetry in North-East India and Southwest China.” Rocky Mountain Review (Summer 2012).

—–. “Ethnic Minority Literature.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 267-75.

—–. “2013, May 12, 7:30 P.M.: Lightning Strkes Twice: ‘Mother Tongue’ Minority Poetry.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 946-51.

—–. “Yi Literature: Traditional and Contemporary.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 123-32.

—–, ed. The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2017.

[Abstract: This unprecedented volume presents important cultural works from the borders, margins, buffer zones, transitional areas, and frontiers from within and around the mega-states of China and India, subsumed within the larger geo-political constructs of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. Many are from communities of poets or individuals writing within the watersheds of the Eastern Himalayas, an area encompassing North East India, Myanmar, and Southwest China. A number are from farther north in Western China and the steppes of Inner Mongolia and the nation of Mongolia.]

Bhum, Pema. “‘Heartbeat of a New Generation’: A Discussion of the New Poetry.” In Lauren R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini, eds. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 112-47.

Chen, Jannis Jizhou. “The Feeling of Ling (the Numinous): Human-Animal Relations in Three Sinophone Short Stories.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 33, 2 (Fall 2021): 169-204.

Chiu, Kuei-fen. “The Production of Indigeneity: Contemporary Indigenous Literature in Taiwan and Trans-cultural Inheritance.” The China Quarterly (Dec. 2009): 1071-87.

[Abstract: This study investigates the complicated interplay between indigenous and mainstream discourse in the production of Taiwanese indigeneity. Via the case study of Syaman Rapongan, an indigenous writer in Taiwan known for his ethnographic portrayal of his tribal culture, I examine how the production of indigeneity in Taiwan involves not only inscription of resistance from indigenous people but also strategic exploitations of transnational legacies by different social groups as they struggle over the definition of indigeneity to formulate their own specific agendas. It is the contention of this article that the question of Taiwanese indigeneity is not just about indigenous self-representation, that is, claiming the subject position of the indigenous people and seeking to restore declining, oppressed indigenous cultural heritages. The study shows that we need to go beyond the familiar scheme of binary opposition to deal with the complexity of the question of indigeneity. The article ends with a re-theorization of the relationship between indigenous and new Taiwanese identity discourse in terms of Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘inheritance.”]

Dhondup, Yangdon. “Roar of the Lion: Tibetan Poetry in Chinese.” In Lauren R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini, eds. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 32-60.

Ethnic ChinaLit (writing by and about non-Han ethnic peoples of China). Bruce Humes.

Fiskesjö, Magnus. Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. (MCLC Resource Center review by Mark Bender)

Gyatso, Sangye (Gangzhun). “Modern Tibetan Literature and the Rise of Writer Coteries.” In Lauren R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini, eds. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 263-80.

Hartley, Lauren R. “Heterodox Views and the New Orthodox Poems: Tibetan Writers in the Early and Mid-Twentieth Century.” In Lauren R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini, eds. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 3-31.

—–. “1983, Spring: The Advent of Modern Tibetan Free-Verse Poetry in the Tibetan Language.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 765-71.

Hartley, Lauren R. and Patricia Schiaffini, eds. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Huang, Hsinya. “Sinophone Indigenous Literature of Taiwan: History and Tradition.” In Shu-mei Shih and Chien-hsin Tsai eds. Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. NY: Columbia University Press, 2013, 242-54.

Jigme, Hortsang. “Tibetan Literature in the Diaspora.” In Lauren R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini, eds. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 281-300.

Knight, Sabina. “China’s Minority Literature.” World Literature Today (Jan. 2022).

[Abstract: China’s fifty-five officially recognized “minority peoples” make up less than 9 percent of the People’s Republic of China. Still, they number more than 130 million, and their literature deserves study both for its political urgency and for its lyricism and philosophical power. Multiethnic fiction speaks volumes about Chinese attitudes toward minorities, as well as these peoples’ historical understandings, their search for roots, and longings for cultural survival.]

Maconi, Lara. “One Nation, Two Discourses: Tibetan New Era Lierature and the Language Debate.” In Lauren R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini, eds. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 173-201.

Pang, Laikwan. “The ‘Nature’ of Ethnic Tensions: Under the Flaming Mountains as Xinjiang’s First Novel.” In Kwai-Cheung Lo and Jessica Yeung, eds., Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene: Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 179-201.

[Abstract: This chapter examines how the ethnic tensions between Han and Uyghur in Xinjiang as described in the Uyghur writer Qeyum Turdi’s novel, Under the Flaming Mountain. While the central political objective of the Cultural Revolution is class struggles, the propagand also needs to make sure that such emphasis would not fuel ethnic tensions, which are sublimated in this novel to form their united effort in order to conquer nature.]

Poupard, Duncan. “The Translated Identities of Chinese Minority Writers: Sinophone Naxi Authors.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, 1 (Summer 2017): 189-208.

[Abstract: On the relationship between culture, identity and power, perhaps the question to ask is not whether the subaltern can speak, but with what voice can the subaltern group speak? It would seem from the case of China’s Naxi minority3 (alongside many of China’s other ethnic groups) that the subaltern can only be heard when speaking the language of the dominant group, in this case, mandarin, the language of the Han Chinese. As the “true” Naxi literature (what is called “dongba”4 literature), written in their native Naxi scripts,5 is constrained (for the most part) to its religious tracts, we must instead look to Naxi literature written in Chinese. How do Naxi writers construct their own ethnic identity while writing in Chinese? I contend that we must follow the example of Bassnett and Trivedi, and try to understand the link between colonization and translation in conceiving of Naxi writers of Naxi literature as belonging to the category of postcolonial writers. They are “postcolonial” in the sense that they are translating a subaltern source culture for a dominant target culture.

—–. “Ethnic Minority Language and Sinophone Minority Literature in China.” Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature 1, 1 (2022): 37-59.

[Abstract: Minority authors in China are generally conceived of as having two choices: they can make an attempt at becoming “major”, by repeating the major literature’s ideological praxis (successful examples may be minority authors who become literary “masters” such as Tibetan author Alai 阿来 and Miao-Tujia author Shen Congwen 沈从文); or conversely they can attempt to become (more) “minor”, reproducing regionalist and minority representations. This is perhaps best encapsulated by the turn of phrase used by Abram de Swaan: “there is a choice for authors between being a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond”. What I attempt to show in this article is the possibility of a third way, a refusal to play by the rules of the game, so to speak, by changing the fundamental framework of the literary territory itself. In the writing of Naxi author Sha Li 沙蠡 we see usage of ethnic language as a form of resistance not against the Sinicizing centre, but against the very notion of being peripheral (to refuse to recognize the existence of two separate “ponds”). Sha Li does this by deterritorializing Chinese in a way that moves the language away from its traditional centre. Sinophone minority literature thus becomes a way of reorienting the centre, a place where the centre is the periphery, and it is in these spaces that the reader can find an “authentic” China.]

Robin, Francoise. “‘Oracles and Demons’ in Tibetan Literature Today: Representations of Religion in Tibetan-Medium Fiction.” In Lauren R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini, eds. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 148-71.

Russell, Terence, guest editor. The Mythology and Oral Literature of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples, special issue of Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 24 (2009).

Schiaffini, Patricia. “The Language Divide: Identity and Literary Choices in Modern Tibet.” Journal of International Affairs 57, 2 (Spring 2004).

—–. “On the Margins of Tibetanness: Three Decades of Modern Sinophone Tibetan Literature.” In Shu-mei Shih and Chien-hsin Tsai eds. Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. NY: Columbia University Press, 2013, 281-95.

Shakya, Tsering. “The Development of Modern Tibetan Literature in the People’s Republic of China.” In Lauren R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini, eds. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 61-85.

Shernuk, Kyle. “2012, 2014: Minority Heritage in the Age of Multiculturalism.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 934-40.

—–. “The Ecology of Travel: Capitalism, Ethnicity, and the Environment in Dadelavan Ibau’s Farewell, Eagle.” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 4, 1 (2021): 10-32.

[Abstract: This article investigates the relationship between ethnicity, the environment, and capitalism in Paiwan aboriginal writer Dadelavan work, Farewell, Eagle: A Paiwan Woman’s West-Tibetan Travels. By foregrounding an ecological analytic framework—a framework inspired by Félix Guattari but revised to reflect the unique position of Taiwan and Taiwan culture at the turn of the twenty-first century—I demonstrate not only the connection between subjectivity, social relations, and the environment, but also how that connection is sustained by distinctly ethnicised forms of knowledge that emerge from within majority Han-Chinese/Taiwanese contexts. I further argue that such literary and practised tactics for ethnic expression challenge the deterritorialising and homogenising impacts of Han-sponsored capitalist expansion. Not just a story of human beings, however, I conclude by demonstrating both the active and passive roles played by the environment, which serves as both the necessary prerequisite that facilitates these ethnic and capitalist projects alike, as well as the price by which their actualisation is paid.]

Sterk, Darryl. “The ‘Indian Gift’ and the Taiwan Indigenous Literary Hunter’s Gift.” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 11, 1 (2012).

—–. “The Hunter’s Gift in Ecorealist Indigenous Fiction from Taiwan.” Oriental Archive 81 (2013): 555-80.

—–. “Ecologising Seediq: Towards an Ecology of an Endangered Indigenous Language from Taiwan.” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 4, 1 (2021): 54-71.

[Abstract: An ecolinguistic system, like a biological ecosystem, is self-regulating, yet it cannot be entirely self-contained, because words, like living species and the non-living substrates upon which they depend, are border-crossing. As a result, any ‘language’ is to some extent ‘creolised’, lexically or syntactically. Creolisation, however, may be perceived as a threat to an endangered language. The Seediq language is endangered, and, like any language, to some extent creolised. Though much less creolised than Ilan Creole, Seediq contains numerous Japanese and Chinese loanwords. Yet many of these loanwords have Seediq analogues. It may be that the Seediq language community has responded to the influx of loanwords by coining new terms based on Seediq roots. If so, their response combines linguistic purism with cultural cosmopolitanism: the loanword is a threat, the concept is not. Regardless, the coexistence of indigenous words with loanwords is part of an ongoing linguistic adaptation to modernity. I try to understand this adaptation in terms of ‘language ecology’.]

Sum, Chun-Yi, Tami Blumenfield, Mary K. Shenk, and Siobhan M. Mattison. “Hierarchy, Resentment, and Pride: Politics of Identity and Belonging among Mosuo, Yi, and Han in Southwest China.” Modern China 48, 3 (May 2022).

[Abstract: How do non-Han populations in China navigate the paradoxical expectations to become “proper” Chinese citizens, like the majority Han, while retaining pride in cultural practices and traditions that mark their differences? This article examines how Mosuo (otherwise known as Na) people in Southwest China have constructed the moral legitimacy of their ethnic traditions and identity through redirecting the Orientalizing gaze toward their Yi neighbors, another ethnic minority in the region. This argument, which displaces the analytical focus from the majority Han and the political state in analyses of the maintenance of ethnic boundaries, delineates how prejudice against a third-party ethnic other can serve as an important pathway for establishing cultural citizenship in the People’s Republic of China. The article ends with a discussion of the methodological significance of this lens for understanding interethnic relationships, while recognizing the challenges of examining ethnic prejudice as a site for negotiating identity and citizenship.]

Tu, Kuo-ch’ing. “Aboriginal Literature in Taiwan.” Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 3 (1998).

Venturino, Steven J. “Placing Tibetan Fiction in a World of Literary Studies: Jamyang Norbu’s The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes.” In Lauren R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini, eds. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 301-24.

Virtanen, Riika J. “Development and Urban Space in Contemporary Tibetan Literature.” In Lauren R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini, eds. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 236-62.

Wang, Ju-Han Zoe and Gerald Roche. “Urbanizing Minority Minzu in the PRC: Inights from the Literature on Settler Colonialism.” Modern China 48, 3 (May 2022).

[Abstract: This article provides a synthesis and critical review of the literature on urban minority minzu 民族 in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The vast majority of the Chinese-language literature on minorities in cities adopts a state-centric view through the lens of stability and integration, focusing on how minorities can adapt to urban life for the purpose of creating a “harmonized” society. This statist narrative not only denies the subjectivity of minorities in the city but also constrains the understandings of the dynamics of urban indigeneity. In this article, we draw on the literature of urban Indigenous peoples in settler colonial contexts to suggest new ways of examining the urban experience of minority minzu in the PRC. We suggest that this literature provides useful insights that help center the subjectivities and agency of Indigenous people in the PRC’s cities. Literature on urban minorities in the PRC can be expanded by engaging with the Indigenous urbanization literature to include coverage of three topics: representation (how minority people are shown as belonging to the city), mobilization (the use of urban space by minority people to pursue social, cultural, and political projects), and mobility (movement and interconnectedness between rural homelands and the city).]

Yang, Yuqing. Mystifying China’s Southwest Ethnic Borderlands: Harmonious Heterotopia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Yanshuo Zhang]

[Abstract: In an attempt to examine a range of responses to this state-envisioned ideal of accommodating ethnic differences, this book analyzes the literary and cultural discourses that surround three minority regions in Southwest China — Dali, which was once the location of the ancient Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms; the homeland of the matrilineal Mosuo known as the Country of Women; and the Tibetan areas associated with utopian Shangri-La. This book borrows Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia” to address the contradictory and often simultaneously existing views of the minority region as rich treasure house of tradition and as intractable barrier to modern development which combine to give rise to productive tensions in scholastic and artistic creations. Through reconstituting and performing the myths and legends of or about minority culture, the representations of the three places turn into heterotopias which are posed between the mythical and the real in different ways. Functioning as a self-reflective mirror, they simultaneously offer images of the actual habitats of the ethnic other which have been subject to socialist projects of modernity, and become a viable means by which to exert material effects on the real landscape. Products of a fascination with alternative social spaces, the three mystified lands all contain conceptualizations of harmony — be it spiritual, gender-based or ecological — that are conceivably absent in the imperfect actuality of the Chinese heartland.]

Zelcer-Lavid, Michal. “‘Green-Colored Uyghur Poet’: Religion, Nostalgia, and Identity in Contemporary Uyghur Poetry.” Modern China 48, 2 (2021): 846-77.

[Abstract: There is wide consensus that Islam is an important rallying point for the Uyghurs and an essential component of their national identity. Yet despite its centrality in Uyghur culture, there is only marginal reference to religion in modern Uyghur poetry. In this article, I argue that poets such as Adil Tuniyaz, Tahir Hamut Izgil, and others, most of whom are secular and urban, choose to relate to religion through mysticism and nostalgia in reaction to the Chinese state’s characterization of Islam as identified with violent fundamentalism and terrorism. By avoiding the use of separatist symbols, these poets contribute to a broad national ethos that strengthens contemporary Uyghur identity.]

Zhang, Yanshuo. Beyond Minority: Ethnicity, Modernity, and the Invention of the Qiang Identity in China. Ph. D. diss. Stanford University, 2018.

—–. “Entrepreneurs of the National Past: The Discourse of Ethnic Indigeneity and Indigenous Cultural Writing in China.” positions: asia critique 29, 2 (May 2021): 423-50.

Eco-Literature and Nature Writing

Bender, Mark. “Dying Hunters, Poison Plants, and Mute Slaves: Nature and Tradition in Nuosu Yi Poetry.” Asian Highlands Perspectives 1 (2009): 117-158.

Chang, Chia-ju and Scott Slovic, eds., Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016.

Chang, Kathryn Yalan. “Ang Li’s The Butcher’s Wife (Shafu) and Taiwan Ecocriticism.” In Simon C. Estok and Won-Chung Kim, eds., East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

Chen, Lily Hong Chen. “Between Animalizing Nature and Dehumanizing Culture: Reading Yingsong Chen’s Shennongjia Stories.” In Simon C. Estok and Won-Chung Kim, eds.,East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

Cheng, Xiangzhan. “On the Four Keystones of Ecological Aesthetic Appreciation.” In Simon C. Estok and Won-Chung Kim, eds.,East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

Chou, Shiuhhuah Serena. “Sense of Wilderness, Sense of Time: Mingyi Wu’s Nature Writing and the Aesthetics of Change.” In Simon C. Estok and Won-Chung Kim, eds., East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

Choy, Howard Y. F. “Expansionist Ethnic Ecology: On Reading Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem.” In Kwai-Cheung Lo and Jessica Yeung, eds. Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene: Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 131-50.

Estok, Simon C. and Won-Chung Kim, eds. East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

Gong, Haomin. “Toward a New Leftist Ecocriticism in Postsocialist China: Reading the ‘Poetry of Migrant Workers’ as Ecopoetry.” In Ban Wang and Jie Lu, eds., China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012, 139-57.

[Abstract: This essays discusses the poetry writing of migrant worker poets, including Zheng Xiaoqiong, and addresses some theoretical issues of ecopoetry within the paradigm of Chinese postsocialism.]

Huang, Peter I-min. “Corporate Globalizatin and the Resistance to It in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale and in Sheng Wu’s Poetry.” In Simon C. Estok and Won-Chung Kim, eds.,East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

Johns-Putra, Adeline, Xi Liu, Loredana Cesarino, Guohong Mai, and Yue Zhou. “Whose World? Whose World Literature? Looking for Climate Fiction in China.” In Alice Duhan, Stefan Helgesson, Christina Kullberg, and Paul Tenngart, eds., Literature and the Work of Universality. De Gruyter, 2024, 315-332.

Kaldis, Nicholas. “Steward of the Ineffable: ‘Anxiety-Reflex’ in/as the Nature Writing of Liu Kexiang (Or: Nature Writing against Academic Colonization).” In Christopher Lupke ed., New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 85-103.

Li, Cheng. “Echoes from the Opposite Shore: Chinese Ecocritical Studies as a Transpacific Dialogue Delayed.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, 4 (2014): 821-43.

—–. “Inventing Climate Change: Nature and Nation in Late Qing Chinese Science Fiction.” Prism 21, 1 (2024): 150-78.

[Abstract: By engaging with and bringing together Chinese environmental humanities and science fiction studies, this article argues that the narratives of weather and climate revealed in late Qing science fiction serve as a metonymic vehicle and a medium for addressing China’s social and political crises. The author analyzes three late Qing science fiction works—Bingshan xuehai 冰山雪海 (Iceberg and Snow Ocean), Dianshijie 電世界 (Electrical World), and Xinshitouji 新石頭記 (New Story of the Stone)—and delves into the intellectual history of modern Chinese environmental ideas. In exploring literary representations and environmental ideas surrounding topics on the air, this article makes three contributions. First, it compels us to reconsider the promises and pitfalls of evading the narrative of nature’s decline. The imagination of the air in late Qing science fiction is characterized by its global scale, inclusive of the surface, but imperial in nature. Second, it illustrates that Chinese domestication of modern environmental ideas is not a one-way street when Chinese intellectuals appropriated Western notions for their own discursive maneuvering. Third, it suggests that the defamiliarization of the air serves as a barometer of understanding the repressed modernity in Chinese literature from an environmental perspective.]

Li, Cheng and Yanjun Liu. “Red China, Green Amnesia: Locating Environmental Justice in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” In Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, eds., Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014, 33-58.

Lo, Kwai-Cheung and Jessica Yeung, eds. Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene: Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Moller-Olsen, Astrid. “Trees Keep Time: An Ecocritical Approach to Literary Temporality.” In Riccardo Moratto, Nicoletta Pesaro, and Di-kai Chao, eds., Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature: Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces. London: Routledge, 2022, 3-15.

Moran, Thomas. “Lost in the Woods: Nature in Soul Mountain.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 207-236.

Moratto, Riccardo, Nicoletta Pesaro, and Di-kai Chao, eds., Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature: Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces. London: Routledge, 2022.

Parrish, Gillian. “The Poetry of Yang Jian.” With translations by Ye Chun, Paul B. Roth, and Gillian Parrish. Earthlines 3 (2012): 34-38.

Sterk, Darryl. “The Hunter’s Gift in Ecorealist Indigenous Fiction from Taiwan.” Oriental Archive 81 (2013): 555-80.

Tam, Enoch Yee Lok. “Recognition, Reinhabitation, and Recreation: Engaging Nature in Hong Kong Literature.” In Kwai-Cheung Lo and Jessica Yeung, eds., Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene: Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 57-79.

[Abstract: In a fast changing place like Hong Kong whose landscape is always under large-scale urban development and infrastructure projects, the notion of nature would always be a site for literary interrogation. The booming days of social construction and economic transformation, that is, the 1970s, was the time when people in Hong Kong showed their identification with the city while at the same time were alienated from nature. Since then, Hong Kong writers have tried to engage nature in their literary imagination of the relationship between humans and landscape. I put forward in this chapter the three modes of engaging nature in Hong Kong literature, that is, recognition, reinhabitation, and recreation. By recognition I mean to re-cognise what nature is—to acquire new knowledge about nature; by reinhabitation I mean a person adjusting their relationship towards nature based on the new knowledge they acquire during their engagement with nature; by recreation I point to the spaces in which people can recreate and re-create themselves, to have enjoyment in nature while reorienting their relationship with society. The discussion focuses on Hong Kong writers like Wu Xubin, Xi Xim, and Dung Kai-cheung to see how they, in the face of large-scale urbanisation of their hometowns, develop a new understanding of their relationship with nature and reshape their awareness of the interdependency between humans and nature.]

Thornber, Karen Laura. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.

[Abstract: East Asian literatures are famous for celebrating the beauties of nature and depicting people as intimately connected with the natural world. But in fact, because the region has a long history of transforming and exploiting nature, much of the fiction and poetry in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages portrays people as damaging everything from small woodlands to the entire planet. These texts seldom talk about environmental crises straightforwardly. Instead, like much creative writing on degraded ecosystems, they highlight what Thornber calls ecoambiguity–the complex, contradictory interactions between people and the nonhuman environment. Ecoambiguity is the first book in any language to analyze Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary treatments of damaged ecosystems. Thornber closely examines East Asian creative portrayals of inconsistent human attitudes, behaviors, and information concerning the environment and takes up texts by East Asians who have been translated and celebrated around the world, including Gao Xingjian, Ishimure Michiko, Jiang Rong, and Ko Un, as well as fiction and poetry by authors little known even in their homelands. Ecoambiguity addresses such environmental crises as deforesting, damming, pollution, overpopulation, species eradication, climate change, and nuclear apocalypse. This book opens new portals of inquiry in both East Asian literatures and ecocriticism (literature and environment studies), as well as in comparative and world literature.]

—–. “Afterword: Ecocritical and Literary Futures.” In Simon C. Estok and Won-Chung Kim, eds.,East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

—–. “Chinese Literature and Environmental Crises: Plundering Borderlands North and South.” In Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, eds., Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014, 1-12.

—–. “Paradoxes of Conservation and Comparison: Taiwan, Environmental Crises, and World Literature.” In Shu-mei Shih and Ping-hui Liao, eds., Comparatizing Taiwan. London: Routledge, 2015, 100-22.

Tong, Christopher K. “The Paradox of China’s Sustainability.” In Chia-ju Chang, ed., Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 239-270.

—–. “Nonhuman Poetics (By Way of Wang Guowei).” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 37 (2015): 5-28.

Visser, Robin. “The Logic of the Void: Translation, Indigeneity, and Islands in Taiwanese Ecological Fiction.” Prism 21, 1 (2024): 131-49.

[Abstract: This article primarily considers the possibility of translating between Indigenous and settler modes of ecological thought and praxis. The former often manifest analogously to quantum field theory, where, as Indigene Linda Yarrowin states, “it’s all connected,” while the latter depend on the Newtonian logic of the void to create simplified universal models. The author first provides green governance examples of these differences from Australia’s Northern Territories and Xinjiang Uyghur Region, adopting Karen Barad’s agential realism to distinguish among modes of thought. Next is an analysis of Taiwanese novelist Wu Ming-yi’s attempt to engage these cosmologies in his acclaimed “ecocosmopolitan” novel The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011), assessing the viability of “patchy Anthropocene” as a means of translating, or making visible, ecologies occluded by Newtonian void logic. The author argues that Wu’s novel succeeds in this endeavor by depicting local and global processes of settler-colonial decolonization and indicting epistemologies of “radioactive racism” that view Pacific islands as “empty” of life, logics that rationalized US Cold War nuclear tests and radiation experiments on Marshall Island Indigenes.]

Vuilleumier, Victor J. Ulysse. “Transcultural Landscape and Modernity in a Feng Zhi Sonnet: Sound, Silence, and the Lesson of Metamorphosis.” In Riccardo Moratto, Nicoletta Pesaro, and Di-kai Chao, eds., Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature: Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces. London: Routledge, 2022, 16-37.

Wang, Ban. “Ecological Critique as World Literature: Alienation of Nature and Humans in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 207-18.

—–. “Ecological Utopia and Dystopia in Chinese Science Fiction.” Prism 21, 1 (2024): 238-55.

[Abstract: Crossing the binary of utopia and dystopia, this article reads Hao Jingfang’s (1984–) novel Vagabonds as a critical ecotopia. I explore configurations of social worlds and eschew the politics of purity by highlighting the complexities of building a utopia while navigating entangled complicity and ambiguity between utopia and dystopia. The Mars Republic in the novel represents an ecotopia built through advanced technologies, where Martians adapt to the arid environment in contrast with the environmentally degraded earth. The novel portrays encounters, shocks, and mutual critiques between two planets. In general, the novel articulates the multicultural and multiracialism on Mars and the coming-of-age narrative of young Martians. Their self-realization rests on the assumption that humans must engage with and appropriate from nature while changing their inner nature.]

Wang, Ban and Haomin Gong, eds. “Ecowriting in an Age of (Un)Natural Crisis,” special issue of Prism 21, 1 (2024).

Wu, Dingbo. “Environmental Literature: A Chinese Perspective.” In Patrick D. Murphy ed., Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998, 300-3.

Xu, Shuang. “The Writing of Inner/Outer World and Ecopoetics in Contemporary Chinese Poetry: An Analysis of Zang Di’s Poetic Creation.” In Riccardo Moratto, Nicoletta Pesaro, and Di-kai Chao, eds., Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature: Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces. London: Routledge, 2022, 70-83.

Yang, Jincai. “Ecological Awareness in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” Neohelicon 39, 1 (March 2012):

[Abstract: If perceived from a thematic perspective, Contemporary Chinese fiction harbors a variety of political dimensions. To subvert the conventions of socialist realism, many works in the 1980s joined to affirm the Party’s reform policies, but writers today seem to be keen on the status quo resulting from the economic reform. The fiction of the new century has fully recovered from the sentimental retrospection and naive, simplistic socialist realism in the decades following the end of the Cultural Revolution. The main characteristic of Chinese fiction in the twenty-first century is its sheer diversity featured by various thematic concerns. Examples of novels can be identified that address issues of globalization, hi-tech, urbanization, marketing economy, internet and poverty and their impact upon the lowly common Chinese such as the disadvantaged rural farmers. This turn to reality gives rise to a burgeoning ecological awareness in Chinese literature. Writers in the new century have diverged from the conventional way to sing along with or speak for the dominant ideology of the economic reform as many did during Deng Xiaoping’s time. They have shifted their attention to the shaded side of contemporary China, writing about the marginalized and reflecting on the social issues that accompany the existing social order. Efforts have been made to explore specific national and regional identities, displaying a reengagement with a realist tradition. It is argued that more and more Chinese, having felt distressed by increasing evidence of environmental deterioration, are now becoming conscious of environmental issues and speaking out about their concerns. This paper then attempts to examine how contemporary Chinese writers contemplate the consequences of China’s explosive capitalist growth and environmental issues in order to fashion their greening dimensions.]

—–. “Environmental Dimensions in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Criticism.” In Simon C. Estok and Won-Chung Kim, eds., East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

Yang, Ming-tu. “Ecological Consciousness in the Contemporary Literature of Taiwan.” In Patrick D. Murphy ed., Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998, 304-14.

Yau, Wai-Ping. “Magical Realism as a Critical Response to the Anthropocene.” In Kwai-Cheung Lo and Jessica Yeung, eds., Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene: Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 109-30.

Yue, Gang. “The Strange Landscape of the Ancients: Environmental Consciousness in ‘The King of Trees.'” American Journal of Chinese Studies 5, 1 (1998): 68-88.

—– . “Tibet, a Topos in Ecopolitics of the Global South.” In Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, eds., Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014, 13-32.

Nativist and Roots Literature

Berry, Michael. “1985, April: Searching for Roots in Literature and Film.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 777-82.

Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne. Modernism and Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Chen, Aili. The Search for Cultural Identity: Taiwan ‘Hsiang-T’u’ Literature in the Seventies. Ph.d. diss. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 1991.

Chen, Li-fen. “Nativist Literature.” In Ke-wan Wang, ed., Modern China: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism. NY: Garland Publishing Co., 1998, 234-235.

Galik, Marian. “Searching for Roots and Lost Identity in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 9, 2 (2000): 154-67.

Haddon, Rosemary M. “Taiwan Xiangtu wenxue: The Sojourner-Narrator.” B.C. Asian Review 3-4 (1990).

—–. “The Xiangtu Wenxue Movement in Taiwan.” B.C. Asian Review 1 (Dec. 1991).

—–. Nativist Fiction in China and Taiwan: A Thematic Survey. Ph.D. diss. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1993.

—–. “Chinese Nativist Literature of the 1920s: The Sojourner-Narrator.” Modern Chinese Literature 8 (1994): 97-124.

—–. “Introduction: Taiwanese Nativism and the Colonial/Post-Colonial Discourse.” In Rosemary Haddon, tr./ed , Oxcart: Nativist Stories from Taiwan, 1934-1977. Dortmund: Projekt Verlag, 1996, v-xxv.

Han, Shaogong. “After the ‘Literature of the Wounded’: Local Cultures, Roots, Maturity, and Fatigue.” In Helmut Martin, ed., Modern Chinese Writers: Self-Portrayals. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992.

Huot, Claire. “Colorful Folk of the Landscape: Fifth Generation Filmmakers and Roots Searchers.” In Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, 91-125.

Kong, Haili. “The Spirit of ‘Native-Soil’ in the Fictional World of Duanmu Hongliang and Mo Yan.” China Information 11, 4 (Spring 1997): 58-67.

Lau, Joseph. “Echoes of the May Fourth Movement in Taiwan Hsiang-t’u Fiction.” In Hung-mao Tien, ed., Mainland China, Taiwan and US Policy. Cambridge, MA: OG Publishers, 1983, 135-50.

Lee, Haiyan. “The Other Chinese: Romancing the Folk in May Fourth Native Soil Fiction.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies ( special issue: “Ethics and Ethnicity”) 33, 2 (Sept. 2007): 9-34. [Deals with the works of Yang Zhensheng, Fei Ming, and Shen Congwen.]

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “Introduction.” In Jeanne Tai, ed./tr., Spring Bamboo: A Collection of Contemporary Chinese Short Stories. NY: Random House, 1989, xi-xvii.

Leenhouts, Mark. “Culture Against Politics: Roots-Seeking Literature.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 533-40. Rpt in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 299-306.

—–. Leaving the World to Enter the World: Han Shaogong and Chinese Root-Seeking Literature. Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2005. [CNWS blurb]

Li, Qingxi. “Searching for Roots: Anticultural Return in Mainland Chinese Literature of the 1980s.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 110-123.

Lin, Sylvia Li-chun. “Toward a New Identity: Nativism and Popular Music in Taiwan.” China Information 17, 2 (2003): 83-107.

Lin, Yaofu. “Language as Politics: The Metamorphosis of Nativism in Recent Taiwan Fiction.” Modern Chinese Literature 6, 1/2 (1992): 7-22.

Liu, Tao Tao. “Local Identity in Chinese Fiction and Fiction of the Native Soil (Xiangtu wenxue)” In Liu and David Faure, eds., Unity and Diversity: Local Cultures and Identities in China. HK: HKUP, 1996, 139-60.

Lupke, Christopher. Modern Chinese Literature in the Post-Colonial Diaspora. Ph.D. diss. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1993.

—–. “1966, October 10: Modernism versus Nativism in 1960s Taiwan.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 669-74.

Stuckey, Andrew. “The Lyrical and the Local: Shen Congwen, Rooots, and Temporality.” In Stuckey, Old Stories Retold: Narrative and Vanishing Pasts in Modern China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010, 83-98.

Turc-Crisa, Daniele. “La litterature des racines.” In La Litterature chinoise contemporaine, tradition et modernite: colloque d’Aix-en-Provence, le 8 juin 1988. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Universite de Provence, 1989, 23-26.

Wang, Jing. “Taiwan Hsiang-t’u Literature: Perspectives in the Evolution of a Literary Movement.” In J. Faurot, ed. Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

Wang, Tuo. “Native Literature as a Stimulus for Social Change: From a Writing Career to Political Activism.” Tr. Juliettte Gregory. In Helmut Martin Modern Chinese Writers: Self-Portrayals. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992, 224-30.

Wang, Yiyan. “Literary Nativism, the Native Place and Modern Chinese Fiction.” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 4, 1 (Jan. 2007). [In Chinese]

[Abstract: Although the importance of the native place in Chinese life is beyond dispute and it has been a significant preoccupation of Chinese authors throughout history, literary representations of the native place still remain to be studied systematically. This paper attempts to examine the construction of the native place in modern Chinese fiction and its role in literary representations of China. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the native place in Chinese literature remained an abstract notion without specific geographical locations and the narrative focus was on the ‘native-place sentiment’ (Bryna Goodman 1995). It is a modern phenomenon that the native place appears as a local cultural space with ethnographic details and is closely related to the need for narrating China, although it can still be abstract and symbolic. The construction of the native place is crucial in the project of national narration for modern Chinese fiction, as it is often created as the nation’s cultural origin and authentication. However, the relationship between the native place and national representation in Chinese fiction is paradoxical, because, on the one hand the native place necessarily differs in origin, and on the other hand, many Chinese authors are devoted to China as a cultural totality.This paper will focus on the paradoxical relationship between the authors’ nativist aspirations to create distinctive local cultural identities and their commitment to the abstract idea of a single Chinese nation. Furthermore, both the native place and national narration are intricately associated with the tendency of literary nativism, i.e. the belief and the practice that literary writing should focus on constructing the native place and that the narrative style should continue and develop the indigenous narrative traditions. In other words, poetics is part of the politics in the configuration of the native place. The initial questions I shall try to answer include: How is the native place viewed and configured in modern Chinese fiction? What kinds of local stories are generated as national tales and what is the role of the native place in such narratives? Why do writers ‘write local but think national’? Why do national myths in Chinese regional literatures compete to identify with the central nation-state?]

Yang, Chao. “Beyond ‘Nativist Realism’: Taiwan Fiction in the 1970s and 1980s.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 96-109.

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.

Yip, June. “Confronting the Other, Defining the Self: Hsiang-t’u Literature and the Emergence of a Taiwanese Nationalism.” In Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004, 12-48.

Zhong, Xueping. “Manhood, Cultural Roots, and National Identity.” In Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 150-70.

Science Fiction

Callahan, William A. “China’s Global Strategy as Science Fiction.” IDEAS (Jan. 2023).

Chau, Angie. “From Nobel to Hugo: Reading Chinese Science Fiction as World Literature.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30, no.1 (Spring 2018): 110-135.

Chen, Pingyuan. “From Popular Science to Science Fiction: An Investigation of ‘Flying Machines.'” In David Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1998, 209-40.

Clements, Jonathan, and Wu Dingbo. “China.” In John Clute, ed., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Online (4 Dec. 2012).

Fan, Yilun. “The Identity Vacillation of a Technological Elite: The Tension between Poetry and Technology in Liu Cixin’s ‘The Poetry Cloud’ (Shi yun).” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, no. 3 (2015): 417-35.

[Abstract: This article explores Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s 刘慈欣 novelette “The Poetry Cloud” (诗云, 1997) by contextualizing it within the debate between scientism and humanism in 1990s China, an event that has been downplayed in its significance in shaping Liu’s ideas. The first section of this article will investigate how the narrative framework of science fiction represents and refreshes the symbolic meaning of poetry in the abovementioned context. Secondly, by analyzing the three main characters, Yiyi, Big-tooth, and Li Bai, with a focus on their perceptions of poetry, the next section will discuss the different opinions they represent with regard to the debate. Finally, by studying Liu’s work in the context of Martin Heidegger’s reflections upon technology, the last section examines his solution to the tension between scientism and humanism in the programming of a poetry cloud that marries poetic imagination with technological means. This article argues that the story demonstrates how Liu, a technological elite, vacillates between technological determinism and humanism, and tries to provide a possible solution to their inherent contradictions.]

Foster, Paul. “Chinese Sci-fi, Viruses, Politics: Three Dystopian Bodies.” China Currents 20, 1 (May 27, 2021).

Han, Song. “Chinese Science Fiction: A Response to Modernization.” Science Fiction Studies 40, 1 (2013).

Healey, Cara. “Madmen and Iron Houses: Lu Xun, Information Degradation, and Generic Hybridity in Contemporary Chinese SF.” Science Fiction Studies no. 139 (Nov. 2019):

[Abstract: Chinese sf can be characterized by its generic hybridity: how it combines, subverts, and reinterprets conventions of both earlier Chinese literary traditions and the Western sf canon. One example of this generic hybridity is the paradigm of information degradation, a common sf trope from H.G. Wells on that shares epistemological and ontological features with the work of early-twentieth-century Chinese realist writer Lu Xun. This essay uses the information degradation paradigm to present a science-fictional reading of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (1918), the first work of modern Chinese vernacular fiction and a foundational text in establishing Chinese national literature. Then, the article extrapolates how this reading of “Diary” is relevant to contemporary Chinese sf through close readings of Han Song’s “The Passengers and the Creator” (2006) and Zhang Ran’s “Ether” (2012). These stories adapt the information degradation paradigm in ways that evoke both Lu Xun and Wells and his followers, maintaining continuity with both traditions and illustrating a generic hybridity characteristic of contemporary Chinese sf that may account in part for its growing popularity.]

Henningsen, Lena. “Reading World Literature in Chinese Science Fiction.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 196-206.

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.

Huss, Mikael. “Hesitant Journey to the West: SF’s Changing Fortunes in Mainland China.” Science Fiction Studies 27, 1 (Mar. 2000): 92-104.

Iovene, Paola. “How I Divorced My Robot Wife: Visionary Futures between Science and Literature.” In Iovene, Tales of Future Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014, 19-50.

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.

—–. Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017.

[Abstract: Challenging assumptions about science fiction’s Western origins, Nathaniel Isaacson traces the development of the genre in China, from the late Qing Dynasty through the New Culture Movement. Through careful examination of a wide range of visual and print media—including historical accounts of the institutionalization of science, pictorial representations of technological innovations, and a number of novels and short stories—Isaacson makes a case for understanding Chinese science fiction as a product of colonial modernity. By situating the genre’s emergence in the transnational traffic of ideas and material culture engendered by the presence of colonial powers in China’s economic and political centers, Celestial Empires explores the relationship between science fiction and Orientalist discourse. In doing so it offers an innovative approach to the study of both vernacular writing in twentieth-century China and science fiction in a global context.]

—–. “Introduction: Voices from the Cybernetic House.” Chinese Literature Today 7, 1 (2018): 42-43.

Jia, Liyuan. “Gloomy China: China’s Image in Han Song’s Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 40, 1 (2013).

Jiang, Jing. “From the Technique of Creating Humans to the Art of Programming Hearts: Scientists, Writers, and the Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Vision.” Cultural Critique 89 (Winter 2012): 131-49.

Jiang, Qian. 2013: “Translation and the Development of Science Fiction in Twentieth Century China.” Science Fiction Studies 40, 1: 116-132.

Kunze, Rui. “Displaced Fantasy: Pulp Science Fiction in the Early Reform Era of the People’s Republic of China.” East Asian History 41, (Aug. 2017): 25-40.

—–. “Fantasizing Science: The Idea of Progress in Early Chinese Science Fiction (1905-1920).” In Thomas Fröhlich and Axel Schneider, eds., Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895-1949. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 230-59.

Li, Hua. “Manufactured Landscapes in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” Forum for World Literature Studies 6, 3 (Sept. 2014): 443–456.

—–. “A Functionalist Scientific Worldview in the Early Chinese Science Fiction Story ‘Tales of the New Mr. Bragadoccio.'” In Jesse Glass and Philip F. Williams, eds., Salutations; a Festschrift for Burton Watson. Tokyo: Ahabada Books, 2015, 46-70.

—–. “The Environment, Humankind, and Slow Violence in Chinese Science Fiction.” Communication and the Public 3, 4 (2018): 270-282.

—–. “Twenty-First Century Chinese Science Fiction on the Rise: Anti-Authoritarianism and Dreams of Freedom.” In The Cambridge History of Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 647-663.

—–. Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Yingying Huang]

[Abstract: The late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a period commonly referred to as the post-Mao cultural thaw, was a key transitional phase in the evolution of Chinese science fiction. This period served as a bridge between science-popularization science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s and New Wave Chinese science fiction from the 1990s into the twenty-first century. Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw surveys the field of Chinese science fiction and its multimedia practice, analysing and assessing science fiction works by well-known writers such as Ye Yonglie, Zheng Wenguang, Tong Enzheng, and Xiao Jianheng, as well as the often-overlooked tech–science fiction writers of the post-Mao thaw. Exploring the socio-political and cultural dynamics of science-related Chinese literature during this period, Hua Li combines close readings of original Chinese literary texts with literary analysis informed by scholarship on science fiction as a genre, Chinese literary history, and media studies. Li argues that this science fiction of the post-Mao thaw began its rise as a type of government-backed literature, yet it often stirred up controversy and received pushback as a contentious and boundary-breaking genre. Topically structured and interdisciplinary in scope, Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw will appeal to both scholars and fans of science fiction.]

Liu, Cixin. “Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature.” Science Fiction Studies 40, 1 (2013).

Liu, Xiao. Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2019.

[Abstract: A groundbreaking, alternate history of information technology and information discourse. Information Fantasies offers a revisionist account of the emergence of the “information society,” arguing that it was developed out of a set of techno-cultural imaginations and practices that arrived alongside postsocialism. Ranging over forgotten science fiction, unjustly neglected films, corporeal practices such as qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories, it constructs an alternate genealogy of digital and information imaginaries. Xiao Liu’s creative, erudite, and richly researched book entirely reconfigures our understanding of the media landscape in 1980s China. Her dense explorations of how new media emerged, coalesced, and interacted in this crucial period range over multiple formats—forgotten science fiction stories, neglected films, photographs, videotapes, computers, television and teletext, qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories—to draw science and aesthetics into a charged and illuminating encounter. The result is unquestionably one of the most original works to appear in Chinese cultural studies since the millennium.]

Luo, Xiaoming. “The Divided City: Imagining the ‘Urban’ in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12, 4 (2018): 583-609.

[Abstract: Following China’s large-scale process of urbanization, the distinctive characteristics of China’s “city(s)” has also begun taking shape. Descriptions and imaginative writings about the city found in contemporary Chinese science fiction have demonstrated unique and yet very specific ways of understanding the city. They have displayed discontentment with the high-level fragmentation of urban space as well as its implicit social inequality, yet also have reflected upon the urban individual’s resort to acquiescence and self-justification as a result of their inability to effectively dismantle such predicaments. In these kinds of imaginary relations, the city becomes an object which is difficult to fathom yet unable to be resisted. Though science fiction novels are able to reconceptualize the city through the reconstruction of space and time, thus bringing about seemingly new visions of the city, yet when these narratives begin to deviate from topics such as the “social property of time,” or that of “social labor,” they themselves then become problematic.]

Lyu, Guangzhao. The Boom and the Boom: Historical Rupture and Political Economy in Contemporary British and Chinese Science Fiction. Peter Lang, 2024.

[Abstract: The Boom & The Boom compares the recent science fiction renaissances in the UK and China, known as the British and Chinese SF Booms, both having emerged in the late 1980s. The author contextualizes the two booms within the transformative political and cultural histories of both countries, characterized by the politico-economic shifts initiated by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. In an era marked by the state’s retreat from society and the redefinition of social subjects through market competition, science fiction assumes a crucial counter position for cultural critique, envisioning alternatives and possibilities embodied in utopian hopes. Emphasizing the “local” rather than the “global” nature of science fiction, The Boom & The Boom interrogates how Boom writers in the UK and China respond to specific sociopolitical conditions in their respective regions. It contends that the British SF Boom serves as a political platform for left-wing writers against Thatcherite politics, seeking alternatives to capitalist realism. In contrast, the Chinese Boom, influenced by the rise of a mass public, grapples with a sense of doubleness, blending futuristic visions of non-capitalist alternatives with collective trauma from the past shaped by Dengist reforms. Only through this comparative lens can we come closer to understanding the “hyperobject” that has given rise to both Thatcherism and post-socialism.]

Ma, Mia Chen. “Rethinking the Urban: Overpopulation, Resource Depletion , and Chinese Cities in Science Fiction.” In Riccardo Moratto, Nicoletta Pesaro, and Di-kai Chao, eds., Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature: Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces. London: Routledge, 2022, 84-97.

Ma, Shaoling. “‘A Tale of Mr. Braggadocio’: Narrative Subjectivity and Brain Electricity in Late Qing Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 30, 1 (2013).

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 University Press, 1998, 152-72.

Price, Robert G. Space to Create in Chinese Science Fiction. Ffoniwch y Meddig, 2017. [this appears to be a self-published version of an MA thesis completed at Cologne University]

Qian, Jiang. “Translation and the Development of Science Fiction in Twentieth –Century China.” Science Fiction Studies 40, 1 (2013): 116-32.

Raphals, Lisa. “Alterity and Alien Contact in Lao She’s Martian Dystopia, Cat Country.” Science Fiction Studies 40, no. 1 (2013): 73-85.

Schneider-Vielsäcker, Frederike. “Spatiotemporal Explorations: Narrating Social Inequalities in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” Prism 19, 1 (2022): 46-66.

[Abstract: This article examines sociopolitical commentary in contemporary Chinese science fiction literature written by authors of the post-1980s generation. With a close reading of Hao Jingfang’s 郝景芳 “Beijing zhedie” 北京折疊 (Folding Beijing, 2014) and Chen Qiufan’s 陳楸帆 “Lijiang de yu’ermen” 麗江的魚兒們 (The Fish of Lijiang, 2006), the analysis focuses on how these works reflect the lived experience of ordinary urbanities in postmodern China and pays particular attention to the stories’ engagement with the chronotope. This article argues that through the chronotope contemporary Chinese science fiction stories express unease about rapid transformation and visualize a divided Chinese society characterized by spatial disparity.]

Song, Mingwei. “Preface.” [special issue on Chinese Science Fiction: Late Qing and the Contemporary]. Renditions 77/78 (Spring/Autumn 2012): 6-14.

—–. “Variations on Utopia in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 40, 1 (2013): 86-102.

[Abstract: This essay focuses on the variations of utopian narrative in contemporary Chinese sf, with a view toward appreciating the genre’s historical development since the late Qing. Through analyzing the writings of three writers, Han Song, Wang Jinkang, and Liu Cixin, this essay examines three themes that characterize China’s current new wave of science fiction: China’s rise, the myth of development, and posthumanity. Deeply entangled with the politics of a changing China, science fiction today both strengthens and complicates the utopian vision of a new and powerful China: it mingles nationalism with utopianism/dystopianism, sharpens social criticism with an acute awareness of China’s potential for further reform, and wraps political consciousness in scientific discourse about the powers of technology and the technologies of power.]

—–. “After 1989: The New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction.” China Perspectives 1 (2015): 7-14.

[Abstract: This paper examines the new wave of Chinese science fiction as both a subversion and variation of the genre’s utopianism of the earlier age. Wang Jinkang’s Ant Life (2007), Liu Cixin’s China 2185 (1989), the Three-Body Trilogy (2006-2010), and the short story “The Micro-Era” (1999) are the main texts this paper studies. Their reflections on utopianism speak to the post-1989 changing intellectual culture and political economy. This paper argues that the new wave of Chinese science fiction contains a self-conscious effort to energise the utopian/dystopian variations rather than a simple denial of utopianism or a total embrace of dystopian disillusionment, and this is particularly represented in Liu Cixin’s novels. The paper also provides some preliminary thoughts on the vision of a post-human future depicted in Liu Cixin’s science fiction.]

—–. “Popular Genre Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 394-99.

—–. “Representations of the Invisible: Chinese Science Fiction in the Twenty-first Century.” In Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 546-565.

—–. “2066: Chinese Science Fiction Presents the Posthuman Future.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 951-97.

—–. “Introduction: Does Science Fiction Dream of a Chinese New Wave.” In Mingwei Song and Theodore Huters, eds., The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First-Century Science Fiction. NY: Columbia University Press, 2018, xi-xxii.

—–. “A New Continent for China Scholars: Chinese Science Fiction Studies.” In Ken Liu, ed., Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation. London: Head of Zeus, 2019, 465-472.

—–. Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction. NY: Columbia University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: A new wave of cutting-edge, risk-taking science fiction has energized twenty-first-century Chinese literature. These works capture the anticipation and anxieties of China’s new era, speaking to a future filled with uncertainties. Deeply entangled with the politics and culture of a changing China, contemporary science fiction has also attracted a growing global readership. Fear of Seeing traces the new wave’s origin and development over the past three decades, exploring the core concerns and literary strategies that make it so distinctive and vital. Mingwei Song argues that recent Chinese science fiction is united by a capacity to illuminate what had been invisible—what society had chosen not to see; what conventional literature had failed to represent. Its poetics of the invisible opens up new literary possibilities and inspires new ways of telling stories about China and the world. Reading the works of major writers such as Liu Cixin and Han Song as well as lesser-known figures, Song explores how science fiction has spurred larger changes in contemporary literature and culture. He analyzes key topics: variations of utopia and dystopia, cyborgs and the posthuman, and nonbinary perspectives on gender and genre, among many more. A compelling and authoritative account of the politics and poetics of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Fear of Seeing is an important book for all readers interested in the genre’s significance for twenty-first-century literature.]

Sterk, Darryl. “The Apotheosis of Montage: The Videomosaic Gaze of The Man with the Compound Eyes as Postmodern Ecological Sublime.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, 2 (Fall 2016): 183-222.

Tarantino, Matteo. “Toward a New ‘Electrical World’: Is There a Chinese Technological Sublime?” in Pui-lam Law, ed., New Connectivities in China: Virtual, Actual and Local Interactions (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 185-200.

[Abstract: Drawing from multiple disciplines and from empirical work, the chapter attempts to establish a broad frame for the cultural meaning assigned to computer technology by Chinese culture. Using as a key concept Leo Marx and Vincent Mosco’s formulation of the technological sublime, the chapter discusses its dynamics on the Western context. Here, the technological sublime feeds from the man/nature duality and the nostalgia for a transcendental state of unity. Narrations about the technology being able to bridge this gap assume the form of “techno-myths” and structure Western technological imaginary. The chapter then discusses the dynamics in Chinese context. Here, man and nature are not in a dichotomy, and the unity state is not transcendental but immanent. Therefore, technology has never been symbolically invested until the Opium Wars’ trauma. The chapter employs Chinese science fiction to illustrate this dynamic. Henceforth, the chapter argues, technology in China has been connected with the idea of national rebirth – at least at the elite level. In its last part, the chapter illustrates thorough an empirical case how this frame shapes the social meaning of computer technology.]

Thieret, Adrian. “Society and Utopia in Liu Cixin.” China Perspectives 1 (2015): 33-40.

[Abstract: This article examines utopianism in contemporary China through the short stories “Taking Care of God” and “Taking Care of Humans” by best-selling science fiction author Liu Cixin. It argues that these stories constitute an ethical resistance to the shortcomings of the capitalist world order into which China has merged during the reform period. Read as a continuation of the modern Chinese utopian tradition as well as a reaction to contemporary trends, these stories offer an articulation of hope that a more just social order can yet be achieved despite the seemingly intractable problems facing the world today.]

Volland, Nicolai. “Soviet Spaceships in Socialist China: Reading Soviet Popular Literature in the 1950s.” Modern China Studies 22, 1 (2015): 191-213.

Wagner, Rudolf. “Lobby Literature: The Archaeology and Present Functions of Science Fiction in the People’s Republic of China.” Jeffrey Kinkley ed., After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society 1978-1981. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985, 17-62.

Wang, Chaohua and Mingwei Song, eds. Special Feature on Utopian and Dystopian Fiction in Contemporary China. China Perspectives 1 (2015).

Wang, Dun. “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.]

Wei, Yang. “Voyage into an Unknown Future: A Genre Analysis of Chinese SF Film in the New Millenium.” Science Fiction Studies 40, 1 (2013).

Wu, Dingbo. “Looking Backward: An Introduction to Chinese Science Fiction.” In Dingbo Wu and Patrick D. Murphy, eds., Science Fiction from China. New York: Praeger, 1989, xi-xli.

Wu, Yan. “Great Wall Planet: Introducing Chinese Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 40, 1 (2013).

Wu, Yan and Yao Jianbin. “A Very Brief History of Chinese Science Fiction.” Tr. Andrea Lingenfelter. Chinese Literature Today 7, 1 (2018): 44-53.

[Abstract: After laying the groundwork by suggesting that ancient texts that offered supernatural explanations for natural phenomena demonstrated curiosity about the natural world as well as scientific imagination, authors Yao Jianbin and Wu Yan give an overview of major Chinese science fiction authors and trends since the late nineteenth century, when science fiction per se was introduced into China. Tying the development of science fiction in China to the nineteenth-century importation of Western science and science fiction, Yao and Wu trace the fortunes of this kind of literature through the turbulent decades of the twentieth century. They further connect the resurgence and international success of science fiction from China to China’s rise as a technological innovator and world power.]

Wu, Yan and Veronica Hollinger, guest editors. “Special Issue on Chinese Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 40, 1 (March 2013).

Yang, Qiong. A Writer’s Dilemma: Gu Junzheng and a Turning Point of Chinese Science Fiction. MA thesis. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 2010.

Zhou, Dihao. “Textual Corrosion and Corrosive Text: Bacteria, Intellectuals, and Science Fiction in the Reform Era.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 3-4 (2022): 60-69.

[Abstract: Dedicated to scientist Peng Jiamu, who mysteriously disappeared in 1980, Ye Yonglie’s “Corrosion” weaves together a thriller of battling extraterrestrial microbes, Ye’s roundabout apologia for Peng’s questioned adherence to socialism, and an uncanny prefiguration of science fiction’s fate in 1980s China. This essay examines the story’s textual dynamics and contextual environment that revolve around the metaphor of invisible, corrosive bacteria. “Corrosion” represents the socialist subject-making of intellectuals as a trial of overpowering biological and ideological threats in a microbial form. However, this logic of political hygiene also underlies the later victimization of Ye and science fiction. This article argues that the prevalence of microbial threat in cultural and political discourses attests to a shared sense of uncertainty toward China’s reforms and allows us to detect the changing structure of feeling of the time.]

Zhou, Yue and Xi Liu. “Representing Environmental Issues in Post-1990s Chinese Science Fiction: Technological Imaginary and Ecological Concerns.” In Riccardo Moratto, Nicoletta Pesaro, and Di-kai Chao, eds., Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature: Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces. London: Routledge, 2022, 98-112.