The Literary Field and the Field of Power: The Case of Modern China

Paragraph ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Hockx
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Rapid Rise ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Literary Communities ◽  
State Interference

This article discusses ways in which Pierre Bourdieu's literary sociology has inspired scholarship on modern Chinese literature, helping it to move away from overly politicized paradigms of literary historiography. The article also asks the question to what extent the use of a Bourdieusian model has resulted in an overemphasis on the ‘relative autonomy’ of a literary field that, at various times during the twentieth century, has been operating under conditions of strong direct state interference. After giving a general overview of the use of Bourdieu's ideas in the study of modern Chinese literature, the article focuses especially on the question of autonomy and the state, arguing for the study of state censors as specific ‘agents’ within the literary field. The article ends with a brief discussion of the rapid rise of online literary communities in China, their practices and their relation to state institutions.

Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937. By Michel Hockx. [Leiden: Brill, 2003. 310 pp. $79.00; €63.00. ISBN 90-04-12915-4.]

2004 ◽  
Vol 178 ◽  
pp. 532-533
Author(s):  
David Der-wei Wang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Paradoxical Situation ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Literary Societies ◽  
Literary Communities ◽  
Literary Journal

This book aims to analyse the rise of modern Chinese literature from the perspective of cultural production. With selected literary communities and publications from the 1910s to the 1930s as points of reference, the book argues that the emergence of Chinese “new literature” hinged not so much on avant-garde thoughts and texts as on a re-configuration of contextual, and sometimes conventional, “relations.” Whereas the extant paradigm sees the literary field from the May Fourth period to the eve of the second Sino-Japanese War as one characterized by gestures such as individualism and iconoclasm, Hockx points to the fact that this field was no less marked by a call for communal solidarity, and a reinstatement of the traditions thought to have been overthrown.Hockx's case in point is the paradoxical situation that, their searches for selfhood notwithstanding, among modern Chinese writers and literati it has been fashionable to join societies or cliques, as if only group bonding could support personal confidence. In so doing they unwittingly maintained forms of social gathering characteristic of premodern Chinese literature. Meanwhile, these new literary groups capitalized on the modern medium of literary journal, through which they were able to solidify their textual and contextual relationships, and cultivate their “styles.”

Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China. By Patricia Laurence. [Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. 488 pp. £45.95. ISBN 1-57003-505-9.]

2004 ◽  
Vol 178 ◽  
pp. 534-535
Author(s):  
Jeesoon Hong
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
University Of South Carolina ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Intercultural Communications ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Literary Communities

This book project began in 1991 when Patricia Laurence, a scholar of Virginia Woolf, encountered a collection of unpublished letters and papers belonging to some members of the Bloomsbury Group and to Ling Shuhua, a renowned modern Chinese woman writer. Although some scholars have read and responded to the materials Laurence used in this book, her expansive coverage, freely traversing the boundaries of time, nation and artistic genres, is exceptional.The work deals mainly with the intercultural communications between Chinese and British intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century, particularly those between the modernist literary ‘communities’ of the Crescent Moon Group and Bloomsbury. The work is the outcome of the author's dedicated research on the subject over ten years, ever since her discovery of the letters, which motivated her to learn the Chinese language and to attend lectures and seminars in modern Chinese literature.

scholarly journals Gender and Superstition in Modern Chinese Literature

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 588
Author(s):  
Gal Gvili
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Literary Methods ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Modern Era

This article offers a new perspective on the study of the discourse on superstition (mixin) in modern China. Drawing upon recent work on the import of the concept “superstition” to the colonial world during the 19th century, the article intervenes in the current study of the circulation of discursive constructs in area studies. This intervention is done in two ways: first, I identify how in the modern era missionaries and Western empires collaborated in linking anti-superstition thought to discourses on women’s liberation. Couched in promises of civilizational progress to cultures who free their women from backward superstitions, this historical connection between empire, gender and modern knowledge urges us to reorient our understanding of superstition merely as the ultimate other of “religion” or “science.” Second, in order to explore the nuances of the connection between gender and superstition, I turn to an archive that is currently understudied in the research on superstition in China. I propose that we mine modern Chinese literature by using literary methods. I demonstrate this proposal by reading China’s first feminist manifesto, The Women’s Bell by Jin Tianhe and the short story Medicine by Lu Xun.

How Is Revolution “Popularized”?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Li
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Chinese Revolution ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Revolutionary History

Revolutionary popular novels that took revolutionary history as their subject matter appeared in the mid-1950s and became one of the most important genres in modern Chinese literature, garnering a large reading public. Tracks in the Snowy Forest, the most representative of these novels, employed three main elements from traditional fiction, namely “heroes, youths, and gods” to represent the modern concept of Chinese revolution, thereby using old bottles to contain new wine. Careful analysis of these novels demonstrates the complex, intricate relationship between revolution and tradition in modern China.

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