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.

“A Story about Hair”: A Curious Mirror of Lu Xun's Pre-Republican Years

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Shan Chou
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Iconic Figure

This article examines the subject of queues in the life and writings of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the most prominent figure in modern Chinese literature. The long-standing reluctance of readers and critics to associate this backward hairstyle with Lu Xun's iconic figure has restricted our understanding of the topic to two well-known satirical portraits in his short fiction, Ah Q and Sevenpounder. This article, however, proposes that the queue is of more than satiric interest—that the author's own experience raises fundamental questions about how he discloses and transmutes certain experiences in his writings. Starting from some little-studied events featuring queues in his pre-Republican years and a puzzling short story that recounts them, this essay analyzes the queue's autobiographical connections and their varied literary manifestations. It also makes a case for reexamining the uses of autobiography for a writer whose life story is an important part of his influence.

Hong Kong in the Midst of Colonialism, Collaborative and Critical Nationalism from 1925 to 1930

China Report ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-47
Author(s):  
Lin Shaoyang
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
New Culture Movement

In the late 1920s, cultural nationalism in Hong Kong was imbedded in Confucianism, having been disappointed with the New Culture Movement and Chinese revolutionary nationalism.1 It also inspired British collaborative colonialism. This study attempts to explain the link between Hong Kong and the Confucius Revering Movement by analysing the essays on Hong Kong of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the father of modern Chinese literature and one of the most important revolutionary thinkers in modern China. The Confucius Revering Movement, which extended from mainland China to the Southeast Asian Chinese community and then to Hong Kong, formed a highly interrelated network of Chinese cultural nationalism associated with Confucianism. However, the movements in these three places had different cultural and political roles in keeping with their own contexts. Collaborative colonialism’s interference with the Confucius Revering Movement is one way to understand Lu Xun’s critical reading of Hong Kong. That is, Hong Kong’s Confucius Revering Movement was seen as an endeavour of the colonial authorities to co-opt Confucianism in order to deal with influences from China. This article argues that Hong Kong’s Confucius Revering Movement should be regarded as one of the main perspectives through which to understand Hong Kong’s educational, cultural and political histories from the 1920s to the late 1960s. Lu Xun enables us to see several links. The first link is the one connecting the Confucius Revering Movement in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the Chinese community in Southeast Asia. This leads to the second link, that is, Lim Boen Keng (Lin Wenqing), the leading figure of the Confucius Revering Movement in the Southeast Asian Chinese community who later became the President of Amoy University, where Lu Xun had taught before his first visit to Hong Kong. The third link is the skilful colonial administrator Sir Cecil Clementi, who came to British Malaya in February 1930 to become Governor after being the Governor of Hong Kong. We can observe a network of Chinese critical/resistant and collaborative nationalism from these links.

The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China. By David Der-Wei Wang. [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004. 402 pp. ISBN 0-520-23140-6.]

2005 ◽  
Vol 182 ◽  
pp. 439-441
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Eileen Chang ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Revolutionary Literature

This celebration of modern Chinese literature is a tour de force, David Wang's third major summation in English. He is even more prolific in Chinese. Wang's command of the creative and critical literatures is unrivalled.Monster's subject is “the multivalence of Chinese violence across the past century”: not 1960s “structural violence” or postcolonial “epistemic violence,” but hunger, suicide, anomie, betrayal (though not assassination or incarceration), and “the violence of representation”: misery that reflects or creates monstrosity in history. Monster thus comments on “history and memory,” like Ban Wang's and Yomi Braester's recent efforts, although for historical reasons modern Chinese literature studies are allergic to historical and sociological methodologies.Monster is comparative, mixing diverse – sometimes little read – post-May Fourth and Cold War-era works with pieces from the 19th and 20th fins de siècle. Each chapter is a free associative rhapsody (sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious; often neo-Freudian), evoking, from a recurring minor detail as in new historicist criticism, a major binary trope or problematic for Wang to “collapse” or blur. His forte is making connections between works. The findings: (1) decapitation (loss of a “head,” or guiding consciousness?) in Chinese fiction betokens remembering or “re-membering” (of the severed), as in an unfinished Qing novel depicting beheaded Boxers, works by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, and Wuhe's 2000 commemoration of a 1930 Taiwanese aboriginal uprising; (2) justice is poetic, but equals punishment, even crime, in late Qing castigatory novels, Bai Wei, and several Maoist writers; (3) in revolutionary literature, love and revolution blur, as do love affairs in life with those in fiction; (4) hunger, indistinct from anorexia, is excess; witness “starved” heroines of Lu Xun, Lu Ling, Eileen Chang and Chen Yingzhen; (5) remembering scars creates scars, as in socialist realism, Taiwan's anticommunist fiction, and post-Mao scar literature; (6) in fiction about evil (late Ming and late Qing novels; Jiang Gui), inhumanity is all too human and sex blurs with politics; (7) suicide can be a poet's immortality, from Wang Guowei to Gu Cheng; (8) cultural China's most creative new works invoke ghosts again, obscuring lines between the human, the “real,” and the spectral.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Rojas ◽  
Andrea Bachner
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Structural Elements ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Chinese Author ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Malaysian Chinese ◽  
Chinese Term

Anchored by an illustrative analysis of Malaysian Chinese author Ng Kim Chew’s 2001 short story “Kebei” [Inscribed Backs], this introduction lays out some of the central concerns of the volume as a whole. In particular, the chapter uses Ng’s story to reassess some common assumptions about what modern Chinese literature is, and how the category might alternatively be understood. In the process, the chapter structures its discussion around an analysis of an early definition of the Chinese termwen, meaning “marking,” “text,” or “culture/civilization”—using three different elements of this early definition to introduce the three parts of this edited volume. The volume is divided into three parts, on Structure, Taxonomy, and Methodology. Part I examines a set of structural elements that inform how texts are produced, distributed, and consumed; Part II focuses on issues of literary taxonomy, and particularly the historical, national, and formal groupings that comprise the category of modern Chinese literature; and Part III illustrates various analytical methodologies that may be used to interpret literary texts.

Learning to Read Lu Xun, 1918–1923: The Emergence of a Readership

2002 ◽  
Vol 172 ◽  
pp. 1042-1064 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Shan Chou
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Fourth Generation ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
The Creation ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
New Literature

As the first and still the most prominent writer in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun (1881–1936) had been the object of extensive attention since well before his death. Little noticed, however, is the anomaly that almost nothing was written about Lu Xun in the first five years of his writing career – only eleven items date from the years 1918–23. This article proposes that the five-year lag shows that time was required to learn to read his fiction, a task that necessitated interpretation by insiders, and that further time was required for the creation of a literary world that would respond in the form of published comments. Such an account of the development of his standing has larger applicability to issues relating to the emergence of a modern readership for the New Literature of the May Fourth generation, and it draws attention to the earliest years of that literature. Lu Xun's case represents the earliest instance of a fast-evolving relationship being created between writers and their society in those years.

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.

scholarly journals Modern Chinese Fiction (1919–1949) in Russia: Early Translation, Publication and Research

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-18
Author(s):  
Xiaoling She ◽  
◽  
Jian Wen ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Modern Chinese Fiction ◽  
Early Translation

The article provides an overview of early Russian translations and publication of modern Chinese fiction (1919-1949). The approaches to the early study of the works of prominent representatives of modern Chinese literature are examined and the reasons why Soviet society is interested in their heritage are identified. Since the 1920s, well-known works of renowned Chinese writers have been frequently translated into Russian mainly by young sinologists. Most of them had been to China and had developed a direct understanding of the development of modern Chinese literature, translating primarily from Chinese and using English translations for various reasons occasionally. The Chinese and Soviet cultural activists also played an important role in the spread of modern Chinese prose in the USSR. At the same time, a serious study of modern Chinese prose began, and until the end of the 1940s was actually at the initial stage, being mainly of a socio-political nature as the study was determined by the state of the ideological atmosphere in Soviet society. Early researchers paid the most attention to the works of Lu Xun, referring to his ideological outlook and artistic merits. Overall, the early translation and study of modern Chinese fiction revealed to the Soviet reader the ideological and social aspects of the works of modern novelists belonging to the left flank of Chinese literature, and laid the foundation for more extensive and in-depth research of modern Chinese literature during the next phase.

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.”

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