ASIA 345 Modern Chinese Literature 当代中国文学

Banned in China, this controversial and politically charged novel tells the story of the search for an entire month erased from official Chinese history.   Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one could care less--except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that have possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn--not only about their leaders, but also about their own people--stuns them to the core. It is a message that will astound the world. A kind of Brave New World reflecting the China of our times, The Fat Years is a complex novel of ideas that reveals all too chillingly the machinations of the postmodern totalitarian state, and sets in sharp relief the importance of remembering the past to protect the future.

Call to Arms is a collection of revolutionary Chinese writer Lu Xun's most famous and most important short stories. Featuring "A Madman's Diary," a scathing attack of traditional Confucian civilization and "The True Story of Ah Q," a poignant satire about the hypocrisy of Chinese national character and the first work written entirely in the Chinese vernacular. Together this collection exposes a contradictory legacy of cosmopolitan independence, polemical fractiousness, and anxious patriotism that continues to resonate in Chinese intellectual life today.

Wandering or Pang Huang was Lu Xun's second collection of stories. It was published near the end of 1925 and included 11 stories written between 1924 and 1925. (Note: The Librivox reading is based on the Gutenberg version which includes only 8 stories, omitting “A Happy Family”, “Soap” and “Brothers”.) The title Lu Xun gave to the collection is Pang Huang, translated as Wandering, but literally means unsettled, agitated or restless. Lu Xun employed points of view in his stories in a way that was novel at the time for Chinese literature, helping readers consider new possibilities about the true nature of the reality around them. Some stories look at the problem of how members of the intellectual class are to live their lives, e.g. In the Tavern, Regret for the Past, whereas others are commentary on traditional customs and institutions, the specific dysfunctions of particular customs and institutions, and also at the general result in which people are discarded, e.g. The New Year Sacrifice and A Public Example.

A towering figure in the literary history of twentieth-century China, Lu Xun has exerted significant and continuous influence through his short stories, which remain as powerful today as when first written. Echoes of these stories are audible in fiction from both sides of the Taiwan Strait.Like many Chinese intellectuals searching for a solution to China's problems, Lu Xun went to Japan to study medicine, which he later abandoned for a career in writing. As a writer he hoped to be a far more effective weapon in the effort to save China. A prolific author of pungent and "dagger-like" essays, Lu Xun was also a tireless translator of Western critical and literary works. "Wild Grass" is a collection of twenty-three prose poems written between 1924 and 1926.

The acclaimed novel of love and resistance during late 1930s China by Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty, as the Chinese battle both Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s. A legend in China, where it won major literary awards and inspired an Oscar-nominated film directed by Zhang Yimou, Red Sorghum is a book in which fable and history collide to produce fiction that is entirely new--and unforgettable.

This is a novel about growing up in the turmoil of China during the first half of the twentieth century.

Christopher Rosenmeier (Translator)

From one of China's most acclaimed writers, his first work of nonfiction to appear in English: a unique, intimate look at the Chinese experience over the last several decades, told through personal stories and astute analysis that sharply illuminate the country's meteoric economic and social transformation.   Framed by ten phrases common in the Chinese vernacular--"people," "leader," "reading," "writing," "Lu Xun" (one of the most influential Chinese writers of the twentieth century), "disparity," "revolution," "grassroots," "copycat," and "bamboozle"--China in Ten Words reveals as never before the world's most populous yet oft-misunderstood nation. In "Disparity," for example, Yu Hua illustrates the mind-boggling economic gaps that separate citizens of the country. In "Copycat," he depicts the escalating trend of piracy and imitation as a creative new form of revolutionary action. And in "Bamboozle," he describes the increasingly brazen practices of trickery, fraud, and chicanery that are, he suggests, becoming a way of life at every level of society.   Characterized by Yu Hua's trademark wit, insight, and courage, China in Ten Words is a refreshingly candid vision of the "Chinese miracle" and all its consequences, from the singularly invaluable perspective of a writer living in China today.

Brook Ziporyn's carefully crafted, richly annotated translation of the complete writings of Zhuangzi--including a lucid Introduction, a Glossary of Essential Terms, and a Bibliography--provides readers with an engaging and provocative deep dive into this magical work.

The past decade has brought dramatic changes to Taiwan: more sophisticated industry, increased political freedoms, and greater challenges to traditional social relations. All the while, a new order has yet to be firmly established. Taiwan's writers have not ignored these transformations, and have addressed their work to the new situation with wit and ingenuity. The thirteen short stories collected here serve as witness to the changes that have gripped Taiwanese society. Whether exposing assumptions about the gulf between rural and urban islanders, examining the aftermath of the island's Cultural Revolution, sex roles, the newly rich, or disentangling the effects of modernization, the author of each story presents the reader with a fully realized fiction that builds on and adds to our understanding of today's Taiwan. Translated from the Chinese by the staff of the National Institute of Translation and Compilation, Taipei, these stories will appeal to all readers intrigued by the fictive portrait of a culture in transition.

This volume presents a broad range of writings on literature from the period of the inception of literary modernity in China. Of the 55 essays included, 47 are translated here for the first time, including two essays by Lu Xun. In addition to the selections themselves, the author has provided, in an extensive General Introduction and shorter introductions to the five parts of the book, historical background, a synthesis of current scholarship on modern views of Chinese literature, and an original thesis on the complex formation of Chinese literary modernity. In the author's view, literary discourses were actively reshaped by Chinese writes and critics as responses to deep-set cultural problematics and the socio-historical imperative of the times. The selection of the essays reflects both the mainstream Marxists interpretation of the literary values of modern China and the marginalized views proscribed, at one time or another, by the leftist canon. With both the canonical and the marginal, this collection offers a full spectrum of modern Chinese perceptions of fundamental literary issues: the nature of the creative act; the relationship between the literary text and reality; the moral, social, and political role of literature; and the filiation of language, literary form, and content. In presenting the Western reading with a Chinese discourse (in the more traditional sense of the term) about literature, the editor attempts to construct a cultural context for the production of texts in modern Chinese literature. Why did modern Chinese writers write? What goals did they have? How did they think about literature and its relation to its audience and the world? To read the response to these questions is to deepen our understanding of the experience of modernity that lies at the root of works of modern Chinese literature. The selections were translated by 33 leading scholars in the field of modern Chinese literature.

Fifty essays by thirty Chinese writers bring to vivid life a period in which modernization and republicanism coexisted within classical Chinese culture. Unlike the more thematically social and political fiction of the May Fourth movement, these xiaopin wen, or modern essays, address their readers with a unique intimacy, adopting a highly "personal" voice that is quietly meditative, lyrical, discreet, and full of wit and melancholy. Tam King-fai supplies critical literary and historical background on the relationship between xiaopin wen and the May Fourth movement, and with and commentary he explicates the form's lyric aestheticism.