Description
This book argues that the revolutionary, anti-revolutionary, counter-revolutionary, and post-revolutionary dialectics in modern Chinese history since the early-20th century characterizes modern and contemporary Chinese literature the most. Central to these dialectics are issues of class. The book contends that one cannot fully understand modern and contemporary Chinese literature without understanding the class character of Chinese revolutionary and counter-revolutionary struggles, including literary practices and their various contradictions. Considering literature via the notion of âthe eventâ and focusing on three specific historical junctures, this project explores how, as a major cultural form, literature has played an outsize role in Chinaâs struggle for liberation and quest for modernity. It highlights the need to understand class and the extent to which it shapes literary and artistic forms and expressions as well as the on-going debates over the relationship between politics and aesthetics.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.- Part I. Quest for Revolutionary Modernity: Literature, Class, and the Challenges in the Making of a New People, 1910s-1940s.- 2. âNational Character,â the Question of Class, and Lu Xunâs Fiction.- 3. Pen as Javelin: Zawen and Lu Xunâs Language of Class.- 4. From âSlumbering Massesâ to âRevolutionary Masses:â Challenges in the Making of Revolutionary Literature.- Part II. Shifting Class Implications: Literature, Return of the "Repressed," and the Question of "the People," late 1970s and early 1980s.- 5. Debating Chinese Revolutionary Literature: From Cold War to the Age of Postrevolution.- 6. The Event of âNew Era Literatureâ and Shifting Class Implications.- 7. Gender-Class Dialectics in the Rise of âNew Eraâ Womenâs Writing and the Return of Ding Ling.- Part III. Into the 21st Century: Literature, Tensions in the Language of Class, and the Rise of Postrevolutionary Working-Class Writing.- 8. Debating Soft Burial: Tensions in the Language of Class in 21st-Century Postrevolutionary China.- 9. Wen Cangmang: A 21st-Century Asking .- 10. Migrant Workersâ Literature, New Workersâ Culture, and the Question of Class Consciousness in the Age of Postrevolution.
