MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Aoife Cantrill’s review of Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism: Renaissance or Rehabilitation?, by Wang Xiaoping. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/cantrill/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk A. Denton, MCLC

By Wang Xiaoping

Reviewed by Aoife Cantrill

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2022)

Wang Xiaoping, Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism: Renaissance or Rehabilitation? Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021. xii + 376 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-46119-2 (E-Book: PDF); ISBN 978-90-04-46118-5 (Hardback).

Rarely when assessing a book do reviewers encourage readers to begin with the final chapters. In the case of Wang Xiaoping’s Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism: Renaissance or Rehabilitation?, however, this reviewer would recommend doing so.[1] Chapters eight to ten and the volume’s conclusion provide a convincing distillation of the book’s critical thrust, by way of a concise rundown of the cultural-political debates that have occupied Chinese literary intellectuals from the turn of the twenty-first century. In these closing chapters, Wang contextualizes his contribution alongside the discussions of the New Left and New Right during the 1990s, as well as more recent commentary exemplified by Zhang Xudong’s 2015 treatise on China’s cultural direction, Cultural Identity in the Era of Globalization (全球化时代的文化认同).[2] These debates are animated by now-familiar questions that accompany any study placing China in the “global” perspective: the significance of “modernity”; China’s superiority, inferiority, or proximity to the West; and what is meant by “postsocialism.” Wang’s work considers these questions anew, answering them with reference to “the renaissance of China’s socialist culture” (348), identified in the title of his conclusion. Continue reading →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Nicolai Volland’s review of Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915-1965, by Yu Zhang. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/volland2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

By Yu Zhang

Reviewed by Nicolai Volland

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright December, 2021)

Yu Zhang, Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915-1965 Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. xii, 294 pp. ISBN 978-0-472-05443-5 (paper); ISBN 978-0-472-07443-3 (hardcover); ISBN 978-0-472-12660-6 (ebook).

In summer 1968, Mao Zedong ordered millions of educated youth to move to the countryside, “where the nation needs you most.” The disbanding of the Red Guards, called to life early in the Cultural Revolution to topple Mao’s opponents in the Party, set off the largest urban-to-rural migration in modern Chinese history. It also profoundly changed the course of modern Chinese literature. Members of the grouping later called “misty poets” first met during rustication, and many of their most celebrated works were written in the countryside. The 1980s revival of China’s nativist literary tradition, in the form of the “roots-seeking movement,” drew heavily on the experiences of sent-down youth (知青) in the countryside and in frontier locations, from Ah Cheng’s 阿城 Yunnan to Zheng Chengzhi’s 鄭承志 Northwest to Han Shaogong’s 韓少功 Hunan. The budding avant-gardists, likewise, found inspiration in the countryside for their experimental works. And the fifth-generation filmmakers were drawn to rural settings, delivering portrayals of the countryside that stood in stark contrast to the images found in films from the 1950s and 1960s. Originally designed to close the gap between urban and rural areas, the rustication of millions of urban-educated youths instead widened the gulf. The confrontation with life in China’s vast agrarian hinterland traumatized many of the “sent-down youth” and, beginning in the late 1970s, shaped the nation’s cultural imagination of the countryside, in literature and in film, for decades to come. Continue reading →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Nan Hu’s review of Decadence in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture: A Comparative and Literary-Historical Reevaluation, by Hongjian Wang. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/nan-hu/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC’s literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

By Hongjian Wang

Reviewed by Nan Hu

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright November, 2021)

Hongjian Wang, Decadence in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture: A Comparative and Literary-Historical Reevaluation Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020. viii+252 pp. ISBN: 9781621965435 (hardcover).

Decadence in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture: A Comparative and Literary-Historical Reevaluation is a necessary and long-awaited revision to the extant scholarship and common perceptions of “Decadent” literature in China.[1] Following an introductory discussion of the history and origins of the term, Hongjian Wang works through a series of studies of seven prominent writers, devoting a separate chapter to each and revealing not only specific ways in which each writer engages with Decadence, but also the cultural and social dynamics fueling the emergence and development of Chinese Decadent literature from the 1920s through the 2000s. Along with the introduction and a conclusion, the seven chapters are divided into three thematically- and chronologically-titled parts: Part I, “Seeing Romanticism through Decadence: Tuifei Writers in the 1920s and 1930s,” is comprised of one chapter on Yu Dafu 郁达夫 and one on Shao Xunmei 邵洵美; Part II, “Farewell to Revolution: Critical Fin-De-Siécle-ization in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s,” analyzes the works of Yu Hua 余华 and Su Tong 苏童, respectively; while Part III, “Performing Perversion: Decadence with Chinese Characteristics from the Mid-1980s to the Turn of the Century,” looks at three writers—Wang Shuo 王朔, Wang Xiaobo 王小波, and Yin Lichuan 尹丽川. Regarding the gap from the late 1930s to the late 1970s, Wang explains that Decadent writing at that time was suppressed by patriotic and nationalistic discourses during the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and then by leftist/communist-inspired politics and ideology in the subsequent civil war (1945-1949) and throughout the Mao era (1949-1976). Continue reading →

MCLC and MCLC Resource Center are pleased to announce publicatiaon of Yingying Huang’s review of Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw, by Hua Li. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/yingying-huang/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

By Hua Li

Reviewed by Yingying Huang

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright November, 2021)

Hua Li, Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. x + 234 pp. ISBN: 9781487508234 (cloth)

The recent history of Chinese science fiction has unfolded in staccato rhythm, punctuated by abrupt suspensions. The incorporation and popularization of science in PRC creative literature, begun in the 1950s and 1960s, was first interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. It then resumed with a brief boom from the late 1970s through the early 1980s, during the cultural thaw of the early reform era, then again came to a halt in 1983 with the launch of the short-lived Campaign to Eliminate Spiritual Pollution (清除精神污染运动). It did not experience robust revival until the 1990s, the beginning of what Mingwei Song calls “New Wave Chinese SF” that continues to the present.[1] During this most recent wave, both the subjects and style of the genre have been utterly transformed, displaying a new degree of complexity that is often attributed more to the influence of translated works than seen as an outgrowth of domestic developments. Continue reading →

MCLC and MCLC Resource Center are pleased to announce publication of Carlos Rojas’s review of Liu Zaifu: Selected Critical Essays, edited by Howard Y. F. Choy and Liu Jianmei. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/rojas/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk A. Denton, MCLC

By Liu Zaifu
Edited by Howard Y. F. Choy and Liu Jianmei

Reviewed by Carlos Rojas
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright November, 2021)

Liu Zaifu, Liu Zaifu: Selected Critical Essays. Edited by Howard Y. F. CHOY and LIU Jianmei. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021. xxii + 375 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-44911-4 (hardback) ISBN: 978-90-04-44912-1 (e-book).

Liu Zaifu was born in 1941, one year before Erich Auerbach began working on what would become his magnum opus, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.[1] The dates of the latter work’s composition—May 1942-April 1945—were significant enough that Auerbach saw fit to have them printed on the verso of the book’s title page. Not only did the composition period of Mimesis closely coincide with World War II, the work was also written in Istanbul, Turkey, where Auerbach had been forced to relocate in 1935, after being dismissed from his academic post in Marburg, Germany as a result of Nazi policies.[2]

Although Auerbach adjusted quickly to his new post in Istanbul, the new setting was nevertheless far from ideal. For instance, Auerbach observes in the epilogue to Mimesis that

the book was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies. International communications were impeded; I had to dispense with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recent investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts. (2003: 557)

At the same time, however, Auerbach also notes that there is a way in which these same restrictions and impediments may have also been enabling:

The lack of technical literature and periodicals may also serve to explain that my book has no notes. Aside from the texts, I quote comparatively little, and that little it was easy to include in the body of the book. On the other hand it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing. (ibid) Continue reading →

MCLC and MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Christopher Rosenmeier’s review of Contending for the “Chinese Modern”: The Writing of Fiction in the Great Transformative Epoch of Modern China, 1937-1949, by Wang Xiaoping. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/rosenmeier/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC book review editor for literary studies, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

By Wang Xiaoping

Reviewed by Christopher Rosenmeier

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright November, 2021)

Wang Xiaoping, Contending for the “Chinese Modern”: The Writing of Fiction in the Great Transformative Epoch of Modern China, 1937-1949 Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2019. xii + 604 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-39862-7 (hardcover); ISBN: 978-90-04-39863-4 (e-book)

Wang Xiaoping’s monograph surveying Chinese literature and cultural theory in the 1940s presents itself ambitiously as “a new paradigm in studies of modern Chinese literature” (back cover), but it belongs, I believe, to a rather different category of writing that had its heyday in the PRC some time ago: a political critique targeting various writers and scholars from a Maoist perspective. Although a study of class dynamics in 1940s wartime fiction might well have been a worthwhile addition to the current research on the period, Wang’s analysis unfortunately appears to be driven by an agenda based on how he thinks class issues and relationships ought to have been portrayed at the time so as better to serve national causes. As a work of academic scholarship, there is little to commend Contending for the “Chinese Modern.” Continue reading →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Xuenan Cao’s review of The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906, by Shaoling Ma. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/the-stone-and-the-wireless/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC book review editor for literary studies, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

By Shaoling Ma

Reviewed by Xuenan Cao

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2021)

Shaoling Ma, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. ix+312 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1147-7 (paper) / 978-1-4780-1046-3 (cloth).

The Stone and the Wireless is a convincing critique of the notion that China lacked communication networks before the advent of Western technoscience. The book undermines any simplistic answer to the Needham Question (a.k.a., “the ‘Needham paradigm’ postulating the supposed absence of modern science in China,” 10), instead tracing a complex web of media technologies in the late Qing period (1861-1906). Ma documents the variety of strategies Qing diplomats, writers, poets, and other media practitioners employed in their efforts to make sense of the era by tinkering with existing technologies through the practical use of technoscience. Ma sheds light on imaginary strategies as well—unrealized media scenarios that nonetheless helped shape the narrative of communication in the late Qing, as found in (gendered) Techno-utopian visions of the future.

The book covers the period from 1861, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was established, to 1906, when the Ministry of Posts and Communications centralized all “transmissions.” This unconventional periodization of the late Qing marks the object of study: mediation. Although “media” as a term in Chinese did not exist in the second half of the nineteenth century, devices and technologies weighed heavily on the minds of those who did not have the vocabulary to describe their experience in a time of transition. Ma proposes to synthesize devices, sciences, and sensitivities, defining “mediation” as “the dynamic interactions between the material and technical process or device, and its discursive significations in texts and images” (5). Mediation enacts a “cleaving and bridging of technics and signification,” which Ma describes, citing Xiao Liu, as a “‘worlding’ process” of “temporal and spatial reorganization” and “generates new relations, conflicts, and negotiations” (5). Continue reading →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jenn Marie Nunes’ review of Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Poets since 1949, edited by Christopher Lupke and Thomas Moran. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/dlb-chinese-poets-since-1949/.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Dictionary of Literary Biography:
Chinese Poets since 1949

Edited by Christopher Lupke and Thomas Moran

Reviewed by Jenn Marie Nunes

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2021)

Christopher Lupke and Thomas Moran, eds., Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Poets Since 1949, Volume 387. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, A Cengage Company, 2021. 461 pages. ISBN 9781410395948 (hardcover)

This volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography presents an engaging selection of contemporary Chinese poets (see here for complete table of contents), compiled for anyone interested in compact and yet detailed introductions to those poets’ lives. In terms of selection, Chinese Poets Since 1949 (CPS) focuses on award-winning literary figures who have made well-documented contributions to contemporary Chinese poetics from various places inside and outside of official poetry arena(s) and along the spectrum from, to borrow Maghiel van Crevel’s terms, “elevated” to “earthly” (and otherwise experimental ideologies and aesthetics). Moreover, in defining “Chinese poets,” editors Christopher Lupke and Thomas Moran look beyond the geo-political border of the Chinese state and include those who write in Chinese language and are located in Taiwan and Hong Kong (although here the volume comes up a little short). The editors clarify that this is not meant to imply anything about the political relationship between these geographical areas, but they are also careful to emphasize that the poetic traditions in these three places “have developed distinctive characteristics, even while sharing a heritage and influencing one another” (xxi). As such, this is a text that pushes gently in the direction of Sinophone literary studies. Continue reading →