MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of John A. Crespi’s review of A History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature, by Fan Boqun. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/crespi3/ . My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk A. Denton, editor

A History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature

By Fan Boqun
Translated by Dong Xiang and Jihui Wang

Reviewed by John A. Crespi
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July 2021)

Fan Boqun. A History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature. Trs. Dong Xiang and Jihui Wang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xxv+804 pp. ISBN: 978-1-107-06856-8.

Fan Boqun’s 范伯群 History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature is a comprehensive and sometimes quirky contribution to the study of a vast corpus of writing that has been overshadowed by literature associated with the May Fourth tradition. Originally published in 2006 as Zhongguo xiandai tongsu wenxue shi (中国现代通俗文学史), and now translated into English thanks to the dedicated efforts of Dong Xiang and Jihui Wang, the book stands as Fan’s magnum opus, the product of a lifetime of research on mass-market fiction, most of it originally published by installment in the tabloids, newspapers, and magazines of China’s major cities, especially Shanghai, from the 1890s through the 1940s. Fan’s term for this category of writing, “popular literature” (通俗文学), he devised to distinguish it from the ideological mainstream of “elite literature” (精英文学) that grew out of the New Literature movement in the late 1910s. The primary goal of Fan’s book is to integrate popular literature into the “family” of modern Chinese literature. As Susan Daruvala describes it in her helpful and concise introduction, Fan seeks to “transcend the structural dominance” of a literary history that gives prominence to elite literature by constructing “a new system of literary history based on ‘pluralistic symbiosis’ (多元共生) which would pay attention to the literary tastes and experiences of the entire population” (xxiv). Put another way, Fan aims to expand the canon of Chinese modern literature to recognize a vast and varied readership for works whose main purpose was to entertain rather than educate and enlighten. In so doing, Fan opens the door to a motley assortment of “pulp” genres—brothel novels, novels of exposure, historical romances, martial arts novels, detective fiction, and so on—whose long-term marginalization in mainland China’s orthodox literary historiography belies their huge popularity across more than half a century in China’s mainland. Continue reading →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Daniel Dooghan’s review of On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China, by Emily Sun. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/dooghan/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, editor

By Emily Sun

Reviewed by Daniel Dooghan

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June 2021)

Emily Sun, On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. x+167 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8232-9479-4.

Narrating the encounter of Chinese and European literature in 1827 Weimar is almost de rigueur in accounts of “world literature.” Goethe is said to have inaugurated the term during a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann, but this alone is of limited interest. What the term does is to crystallize for that moment a number of political, economic, and aesthetic projects that antedate and follow the conversation, offering a vision of a literary totality. The utopian spirit of that vision—however evanescent—has driven the boom in studies of world literature over the past two decades, and though the ensuing debates have questioned the nature and desirability of such an aesthetic utopia, they have also illuminated the vast network of global connections that enabled Goethe to make his pronouncement. These works on world literature, far from genuflecting to the poet’s example, reveal more about that network and the possibilities of world literature as a concept. Emily Sun’s On the Horizon of World Literature is one of these works.

Predictably, then, the introduction, “Reading Literary Modernities on the Horizon of World Literature,” begins with Goethe to illustrate its thesis and its method. Sun shows how the temporally and geographically distant concept of world literature manifests in China as part of a revolutionary project beginning at the turn of the last century (1-2). From this remote affinity she seeks to articulate how world literature “designates a framework for processes of textual classification, revaluation, and production in a plurality of connected yet differently inherited and inhabited lifeworlds” (2). In this framing capacity, world literature is inextricably linked to the discipline of comparative literature and to the possibility of cross-cultural comparison. Moreover, Sun retains some Goethean hope by offering world literature “as an ideal that continues to orient and motivate ongoing exposure to and exchange with the foreign” (3). Whatever its theoretical limitations, world literature for Sun is not just a term of literary criticism, but a metaphysical project: “the ‘world’ of ‘world literature’ does not already exist as the equivalent of a map or other representation of the inhabited globe, but rather continually comes into being as that which is activated and reactivated in the processes of exposure and exchange” (3). The texts analyzed in the book exemplify these processes, as does Sun’s staging of them. Continue reading →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Kyle Shernuk’s review of Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions across the Pacific, by Clara Iwasaki. The review appears below and at its online home. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk A. Denton, editor

Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon:
Refractions across the Pacific

By Clara Iwasaki

Reviewed by Kyle Shernuk

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June 2021)

Clara Iwasaki, A Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions Across the Transpacific Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2020. ix + 230 pp. ISBN 9781621965473.

Clara Iwasaki’s Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions across the Transpacific presents readers with new perspectives on four canonical figures of modern Chinese literature: Xiao Hong (1911-1941), Yu Dafu (1896-1945), Lao She (1899-1966), and Zhang Ailing (1920-1995). She brings needed attention to the roles of literary and cultural translation, textual reception and negotiation, and, of course, the transpacific networks across which the majority of these processes take place. As scholars of Area Studies continue to reevaluate the field’s Cold-War origins and imagine new roles for the discipline in the academy, Iwasaki’s book offers a framework that energizes Chinese studies by connecting it to the adjacent fields of Transpacific and Asian American studies. She develops an analytic framework for working horizontally across disciplines, one which combines their shared components and concerns to create a more holistic map of the networks that unite these Chinese writers and their textual legacies across the Pacific throughout the twentieth century. Continue reading →

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Brian Skerratt’s review of A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune: Classical-Style Poetry of Modern Chinese Writers, by Haosheng Yang. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/skerratt/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, editor

A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune:
Classical-Style Poetry of Modern Chinese Writers

By Haosheng Yang

Reviewed by Brian Skerratt

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March, 2021)

Haosheng Yang, A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune: Classical-Style Poetry of Modern Chinese Writers Leiden: Brill, 2016. ix + 255 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-31079-7

Classical-style poetry is an unlucky genre. If one has not experienced suffering and struggled in society, one can hardly write any satisfying poems. . . . The feeling of suffering is not necessarily described in poems immediately. Poems do not necessarily describe suffering directly either. But because of the suffering, one’s emotion can be stimulated more deeply; one will think about writing poems, will be more sympathetic when reading other’s [sic] poems, and will express one’s own feelings more easily, even though those feelings might be far apart from suffering (Yang, 221).

So wrote Nie Gannu 聶紺弩 (1903-1986) in a letter to a friend. Nie, like many Chinese intellectuals of his generation, had enthusiastically embraced new ideas and social progress—including the New Culture Movement, New Literature, and leftist revolution—only to become a victim of the new China he had helped create. After training at the prestigious Huangpu Military Academy, Nie began a career as a journalist and intellectual; he was critical of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and later joined the League of Left-Wing Writers. However, only a matter of years after the Communists came to power in 1949, Nie was labeled a rightist and sent to the “Great Northern Wilderness” (北大荒) in Heilongjiang for four years of labor reform. After he returned from hard labor, he was arrested again as a counterrevolutionary and only released following another ten years of confinement. What makes Nie’s case interesting is that his time spent doing hard labor inspired him to produce poetry—and not just any poetry, but dense, highly allusive, classical poetry, exactly the form and style attacked so vehemently by the New Literature movement decades earlier. When the supervisor at the labor site instructed the prisoners to compose poetry, as part of a nationwide campaign to create “new folk songs,” Nie recalls, “I do not know why, but suddenly I thought about composing poems in the old style. Maybe the farther I was from the literary circle, the more I believed that only old poetry was poetry. . . . As a result, that might be the first time I wrote about labor, and also the first time I officially composed classical-style poetry” (qtd. 183). The extreme physical and psychological toll of labor reform led this writer in his late fifties to find solace in poetry, and that solace he found most naturally in traditional, classical verse, rather than the modern, vernacular poetry demanded by fashionable literary circles, which he himself had once advocated. Continue reading →