MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Haihong Yang’s review of Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times, by Zhiyi Yang. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/haihong-yang/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Poetry, History, Memory:
Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times

By Zhiyi Yang

Reviewed by Haihong Yang

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright April, 2024)

Zhiyi Yang, Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. xxiv + 326 pages: ISBN: 9780472076505  (hardcover); ISBN: 9780472056507 (paperback); ISBN: 9780472903917 (Open Access).

In the Chinese literary tradition, lyric poetry is often hailed as a necessary supplement to official histories. The famous quote “words reflect the heart-mind” (言為心聲) suggests that poetic language is an almost transparent medium of the writer’s inner thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. Classical poems are often cherished for their biographical value because they are thought to delineate a writer’s political inclinations, personality, and literary competence. Collectively, they portray a society’s political and cultural landscape. In the past few decades, scholars of classical Chinese poetry have challenged the conflation of a historical subject with a poetic one and the presumed binaries between the inside of a person (heart-mind) and the outside (language), the individual and society, and history and poetry. Zhiyi Yang’s Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times is a significant addition to these non-binary scholarly examinations of a writer and his era. The book provides a nuanced analysis of a slice of modern Chinese history, bringing one of it most controversial figures, Wang Jingwei (汪精衞), under a critical lens. Through an innovative theoretical approach, thorough archival research and fieldwork, and astute close readings of poetic texts, Yang investigates the complex interrelationship between the textual subject, the human subject, and the collective cultural memory of the former two.

The book consists of two main parts (each of which is comprised of three chapters that are themselves made up of four to eleven separately titled subsections): “Part I: The End of Literati Politics,” which is a critical biography of Wang Jingwei, and “Part II: The Poetics of Memory,” comprising a study of the complex relations between Wang’s poetry, cultural memory, and historiographies. The author divides Wang Jingwei’s life into three stages: his status as a revolutionary pioneer, his reputation as a well-respected statesman, and his being labeled a national “traitor” [quotation marks in the original]. Whereas Yang’s narration of Wang’s life follows a chronological order, the three chapters in Part I of the book employ distinct ways of organizing important personal and historical events. Continue reading Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times review →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Thomas Moran’s review of A Cultural History of Modern Chinese Literature, by Wu Fuhui, translated by Rui (Myra) Ma. Too long to post here in its entiretly, find a teaser below. The entire review can be read at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/moran/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

By Wu Fuhui
Translated by Rui (Myra) Ma

Reviewed by Tom Moran
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2024)

WU Fuhui, A Cultural History of Modern Chinese Literature. Translated by Rui [Myra] Ma) and with Introduction by David Der-wei Wang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xliv + 813 pp. ISBN: 9781107069497 (hardback).

An Illustrated History of the Development of Modern Chinese Literature (插图本中国现代文学发展史), published in 2010 by Peking University Press, is the culmination of the life’s work of Wu Fuhui 吴福辉, who died January 15, 2021. The Cambridge University Press 2020 English translation by Myra Ma, titled A Cultural History of Modern Chinese Literature (hereafter, History), is the subject of this review. The 813-page translation follows the 480-page original exactly; paragraphs break in the same places in both books, and all the footnotes in the original are in the translation, as are all the illustrations. The English version adds an index, which is unfortunately incomplete, and includes Chinese characters for names and titles on first mention, albeit inconsistently. The translation is an admirable achievement, but to make full use of the English version, one needs to also have read the Chinese original, as I discuss later in a detailed look at the translation itself, which will include attention to citation issues and other matters. I start with a brief biography of the author and then offer my take on his book, which is followed by a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book’s contents. I end by explaining why Wu Fuhui says writing his history was not like playing a record album and not like knitting a sweater, but was like creating a mosaic.

Wu’s conception of “modern Chinese literature” begins in a chapter on 1870s Shanghai, entitled “Wangping Street – Fuzhou Road: The Changing Scene of Chinese Literature” and concludes with the chapter “A Chronicle of Literary Events in the Year 1948 (An Era of Transition).” Even given this approximately seventy-five year parameter, History covers so much and in so much fascinating detail that it is an essential resource for experts and advanced students of modern Chinese literature. It is easily one of the best single-volume English-language references on modern Chinese literature that we have. I anticipate consulting it regularly. The book, it should be cautioned, is for readers who know the history of twentieth-century China and who know at least something about modern Chinese literature.  For example, to fully understand chapter 20, a reader has to already know what the Beiyang government was, who Duan Qirui was, what the Northern Expedition was, what the April 12th and March 18th Incidents were, and what the Shanghai concessions were and why they offered some measure of freedom of expression. The book also assumes readers already have some familiarity with the lives and careers of the more well-known May Fourth writers. This means that the book is not for beginning students or general readers, as does the $211.00 price.

Wu Fuhui was born in 1939 in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. In 1950, Wu’s family moved to Anshan, Liaoning province and, in 1959, Wu graduated from teacher’s college, after which he taught middle school Chinese language arts for almost twenty years. In 1978, at the age of thirty-nine, Wu enrolled at Peking University, where he studied modern Chinese literature with Wang Yao 王瑶 and Yan Jiayan 严家炎, graduating with a Master’s degree in 1981. Among Wu’s classmates in the same 1978 enrolling class—the first after the end of the Cultural Revolution—were Qian Liqun 钱理群and Wen Rumin 温儒敏. In 1987, Qian, Wen, Wu, and Wang Chaobing 王超冰, daughter of Wang Yao, published Thirty Years of Modern Chinese Literature (中国现代文学三十年). The revised edition by Qian, Wen, and Wu was published in 1998. Wu’s other books include a biography of Sha Ting 沙汀 (1990), a collection of critical essays titled Smiling in Shackles (带着枷锁的笑, 1991), Shanghai School Fiction in the Urban Vortex (都市漩流中的海派小说, 1995), and a book of essays on the literatures of Beijing and Shanghai, Travels in Two Cities (游走双城, 2006). In Chen Pingyuan’s 陈平原 view, Wu’s major contribution as a scholar before History was his work on the “Shanghai School” (海派) writers.[1]  [READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW HERE]

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Wenjin Cui’s review of States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century, by Adhira Mangalagiri. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/wenjin-cui/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

States of Disconnect: The China-India
Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century

By Adhira Mangalagiri

Reviewed by Wenjin Cui

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2023)

Adhira Mangalagiri, States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. vii + 286 pp. Index. ISBN: 9780231205696​ (Paperback); 9780231205689 (Hardcover);  9780231556118​  (E-book).

This book sets an ambitious task to “rethink the transnational” through the conceptualization of what it calls “states of disconnect.” While its specific focus is on “the China-India literary relation in the twentieth century,” States of Disconnect aims at no less than reshaping the paradigm of comparison and supplying a critical vocabulary for a new ethics of transnational relation.

According to Mangalagiri, “states of disconnect”­—the key term of the book, the usage of which is directly informed by Judith Butler’s “contemplation on the meanings of ‘states’” (218)—not only refers in a literal sense to nation-states in disconnect, but also “describes the conditions of transnationalism in crisis a particular text inhabits and indexes” (21) and, most critically, designates “hermeneutic strategies for contending with disconnect and finding in the seeming ends of transnationalism—amid declining globalized hyperconnectivity and rising national parochialism—an ethics of literary relation” (30). Specifically, the book conceptualizes three such states: friction, ellipsis, and contingency. In addition to a brief explication given in the introduction, it provides detailed discussions in five chapters of case studies as well as a theoretical elaboration in the conclusion. Continue reading States of Disconnect review →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Paul Katz’s review of A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination, by Haiyan Lee. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/paul-katz/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

A Certain Justice:
Toward An Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination

By Haiyan Lee

Reviewed by Paul Katz

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2023)

Haiyan Lee. A Certain Justice: Toward An Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023, xii + 352 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82524-3 (cloth) / ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82525-0 (paper) / ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82526-7 (e-book).

A Certain Justice: Toward An Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination represents a pioneering achievement in our understanding of Chinese legal culture as well as its significance in the context of judicial systems worldwide. Haiyan Lee has amassed and boldly explored an astonishing array of literature, ranging from the writings of Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) to the Cultural Revolution “model opera” (樣板戲) The White-Haired Girl (白毛女) and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

The main goal of the study is to present an overview of how Chinese forms of justice have been conceptualized and practiced from the dynastic era to the present day. Lee endeavors to achieve this goal by exploring texts that have largely been overlooked yet possess the potential to address significant philosophical questions concerning truth, freedom, humanity, etc., particularly literary works that shed light on justice’s place in the complex realities of human life. The author’s views have been profoundly molded by a comparative perspective resulting from her experiences as an immigrant academic as well as from he “enduring fascination” with American legal culture (ix).

The theoretical framework applied in A Certain Justice features a “tension-filled triune” formed by justice, law, and morality (2). A second triune involves the Chinese ideas of qing 情 (human feelings), fa 法 (the law of the land), and li 理 (cosmic order), which Lee posits as being roughly equivalent with customary, bureaucratic, and divine forms of law (4-5). However, the heart of her analysis lies in the concepts of “high” and “low” justice as organizing principles “to make sense of the political-legal culture of a nonliberal society” (in this case China; 7-8), with the former highlighting the “legitimacy and moral supremacy of the ruler” (achieved via penal law) and the latter “fair treatment” of individuals (during civil law procedures; social justice). One of the author’s main arguments stresses the “subsumption of low justice under high justice,” with high justice consisting of actions rulers deem to be justified. Moreover, in order to ensure the attainment of high justice, low justice may on occasion be curtailed, made partial, or otherwise modified (5, 21, 27). Continue reading A Certain Justice review →