1st Edition

China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century

Edited By Jie Lu Copyright 2008
    304 Pages
    by Routledge

    304 Pages
    by Routledge

    China’s literary and cultural production at the turn of the twenty-first century is marked by heterogeneity, plurality, and diversity.  Given its complexity, the literary/cultural production of this period perhaps can be understood most productively as a response to a global modernity that has touched and transformed all aspects of contemporary Chinese reality.

    The eleven essays in this book offer an introduction to some of the most important works published at the turn of the twenty-first century. In combining textual analysis of specific works with theoretical insights, and in locating the texts in their sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts, the essays explore key theoretical issues and intellectual concerns of the time. They collectively draw a broad contour of new developments, major trends, and radical changes, capturing the intellectual and cultural Zeitgeist of the age. All in all, these essays offer new theoretical approaches to, and critical perspectives on, contemporary Chinese literature and culture.

    Introduction: China’s New Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century Part 1 Re-imagining and Re-thinking History at the Age of Globalization 1. History in a Mythical Key: Temporality, Memory, and Tradition in Wang Anyi’s Fiction 2. National Trauma, Global Allegory: Reconstruction of Collective Memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite 3. Globalizing Chinese Literature: Toward a Rewriting of Contemporary Chinese Literary Culture 4. The Quest of Ma Lihua, a Han Intellectual in Tibet; Who Is Afraid of Lu Xun?—Politics of ‘Debates about Lu Xun’ (Lu Xun lun zheng) and the Question of His Legacy in Post-Revolution China Part 2 Modern Individuals, High-tech and the City 5. Shanghai Cosmopolitan: Class, Gender and Cultural Citizenship in Weihui’s Shanghai Babe 6. Marketing Chinese Women Writers in the 1990s, or the Politics of Self-Fashioning 7. From Real Time to Virtual Reality: Chinese Cinema in the Internet Age 8. Links with the Past—Mainland China’s Online Literary Communities and their Antecedents 9. Spaces of Disappearance: Aesthetic Responses to Contemporary Beijing City Planning 10. Spectacles of Remembrance: Nostalgia in Contemporary Chinese Art 11. Rewriting Beijing: A Spectacular City in Qiu Huadong’s Urban Fiction

    Biography

    Jie Lu