Spatial Literary Studies in China

Spatial Literary Studies in China
Author: Ying Fang
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2022-11-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031039149

Spatial Literary Studies in China explores the range of vibrant and innovative research being done in China today. Chinese scholars have been exploring spatially oriented literary criticism in two different and mutually reinforcing directions: the first has focused on the study of Western literature, especially U.S. and European texts and theory, and the second has examined Chinese cultures, texts, and spaces. This collection of essays demonstrates Chinese scholars’ insightful interpretation, evaluation, and innovative application of international spatial analyses, theories, and methodologies, as well as their inspiring exploration and reconstruction of distinctively Chinese critical and theoretical discourses. For the first time in English, the essays in this volume demonstrate the vitality of literary geography, geocriticism, and the spatial humanities in China in the twenty-first century.

Spatial Imaginaries in Mid-Tang China

Spatial Imaginaries in Mid-Tang China
Author: Ao Wang
Publisher: Cambria Sinophone World
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781604979411

This book explores a new and innovative topic-the relationship between geographical advancements in the Mid-Tang period (790s to 820s) and spatial imaginaries in contemporaneous literature.

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China
Author: Ling Hon Lam
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231547587

Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing). Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.

Spatial Literary Studies

Spatial Literary Studies
Author: Robert T. Tally Jr.
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000208044

Following the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination offers a wide range of essays that reframe or transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. These essays reflect upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality. Working within or alongside related approaches, such as geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities, these essays examine the relationship between literary spatiality and different genres or media, such as film or television. The contributors to Spatial Literary Studies draw upon diverse critical and theoretical traditions in disclosing, analyzing, and exploring the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world, thus making new textual geographies and literary cartographies possible.

Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory

Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory
Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2001-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822380161

These groundbreaking essays use critical theory to reflect on issues pertaining to modern Chinese literature and culture and, in the process, transform the definition and conceptualization of the field of modern Chinese studies itself. The wide range of topics addressed by this international group of scholars includes twentieth-century literature produced in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China; film, art, history, popular culture, and literary and cultural criticism; as well as the geographies of migration and diaspora. One of the volume’s provocative suggestions is that the old model of area studies—an offshoot of U.S. Cold War strategy that found its anchorage in higher education—is no longer feasible for the diverse and multifaceted experiences that are articulated under the rubric of “Chineseness.” As Rey Chow argues in her introduction, the notion of a monolithic Chineseness bound ultimately to mainland China is, in itself, highly problematic because it recognizes neither the material realities of ethnic minorities within China nor those of populations in places such as Tibet, Taiwan, and post–British Hong Kong. Above all, this book demonstrates that, as the terms of a chauvinistic sinocentrism become obsolete, the critical use of theory—particularly by younger China scholars whose enthusiasm for critical theory coincides with changes in China’s political economy in recent years—will enable the emergence of fresh connections and insights that may have been at odds with previous interpretive convention. Originally published as a special issue of the journal boundary 2, this collection includes two new essays and an afterword by Paul Bové that places its arguments in the context of contemporary cultural politics. It will have far-reaching implications for the study of modern China and will be of interest to scholars of theory and culture in general. Contributors. Stanley K. Abe, Ien Ang, Chris Berry, Paul Bové, Sung-cheng Yvonne Chang, Rey Chow, Dorothy Ko, Charles Laughlin, Leung Ping-kwan, Kwai-cheung Lo, Christopher Lupke, David Der-wei Wang, Michelle Yeh

Space, Politics, and Cultural Representation in Modern China

Space, Politics, and Cultural Representation in Modern China
Author: Enhua Zhang
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317326121

Regarding revolution as a spatial practice, this book explores modes of spatial construction in modern China through a panoramic overview of major Chinese revolutionary events and nuanced analysis of cultural representations. Examining the relationship between revolution, space, and culture in modern China the author takes five spatially significant revolutionary events as case studies - the territorial dispute between Russia and the Qing dynasty in 1892, the Land Reform in the 1920s, the Long March (1934-36), the mainland-Taiwan split in 1949, and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) - and analyses how revolution constructs, conceives, and transforms space. Using materials associated with these events, including primarily literature, as well as maps, political treatises, historiography, plays, film, and art, the book argues that in addition to redirecting the flow of Chinese history, revolutionary movements operate in and on space in three main ways: maintaining territorial sovereignty, redefining social relations, and governing an imaginary realm. Arguing for reconsideration of revolution as a reorganization of space as much as time, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese culture, society, history and literature.

Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature

Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature
Author: Riccardo Moratto
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000553426

Focusing on ecocritical aspects throughout Chinese literature, particularly modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the contributors to this book examine the environmental and ecological dimensions of notions such as qing (情) and jing (境). Chinese modern and contemporary environmental writing offers a unique aesthetic perspective toward the natural world. Such a perspective is mainly ecological and allows human subjects to take a benign and nonutilitarian attitude toward nature. The contributors to this book demonstrate how Chinese literary ecology tends toward an ecological-systemic holism from which all human behaviors should be closely examined. They do so by examining a range of writers and genres, including Liu Cixin’s science fiction, Wu Ming-yi’s environmental fiction, and Zhang Chengzhi’s historical narratives. This book provides valuable insights for scholars and students looking to understand how Chinese literature conceptualizes the relationship between humanity and nature, as well as our role and position within the natural realm.

The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature

The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature
Author: Kuei-fen Chiu
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2021-12-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9888528726

In The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature, Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang aim to bridge the distance between the scholarship of world literature and that of Chinese and Sinophone literary studies. This edited volume advances research on world literature by bringing in new developments in Chinese/Sinophone literatures and adds a much-needed new global perspective on Chinese literary studies beyond the traditional national literature paradigm and its recent critique by Sinophone studies. In addition to a critical mapping of the domains of world literature, Sinophone literature, and world literature in Chinese to delineate the nuanced differences of these three disciplines, the book addresses the issues of translation, genre, and the impact of media and technology on our understanding of “literature” and “literary prestige.” It also provides critical studies of the complicated ways in which Chinese and Sinophone literatures are translated, received, and reinvested across various genres and media, and thus circulate as world literature. The issues taken up by the contributors to this volume promise fruitful polemical interventions in the studies of world literature from the vantage point of Chinese and Sinophone literatures. “An outstanding volume full of insights, with chapters by leading scholars from an admirable range of perspectives, Chiu and Zhang’s The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature expertly integrates Chinese and Sinophone studies with world literature scholarship, opening numerous possibilities for future analyses of literature, media, and cultural history.” —Karen L. Thornber, Harvard University “This book is, at once, the best possible introduction to recent debates on world literature from the perspective of Chinese-Sinophone literatures, and a summa critica that thinks through their transcultural drives, global travels, varied worldings, and translational forces. The comparative perspectives gathered here accomplish the necessary and urgent task of reconfiguring both the idea of the world in world literature and the ways we study the inscriptions of Chinese-Sinophone literatures in the world.” —Mariano Siskind, Harvard University

Identity, Space, and Everyday Life in Contemporary Northeast China

Identity, Space, and Everyday Life in Contemporary Northeast China
Author: Zhen Troy Chen
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2024-01-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9819945305

This edited volume is first of its kind to document and critically analyse the changes took place snice China’s opening-up and reform and its impact on Dongbei, China’s North-East region, known for its remote and vast landscape, unique and othered culture, rich resources, mighty infrastructures and industries, geopolitical significance. Through presenting up-to-date and multidimensional case studies, the book covers three major aspects of Dongbei, which put people at the heart of our scholarly focus, namely people’s mediated life through traditional and new media; people’s social, cultural, and living spaces; artistic and fictional representations of people’s everyday life.

Keywords in Western Literary Criticism and Contemporary China

Keywords in Western Literary Criticism and Contemporary China
Author: Yamin Hu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429826842

Since the reform and opening up of China in 1978, Western literary criticism has begun to flourish and gain in popularity within the country’s academic literature community. These two volumes meticulously select and examine nine of the most influential keywords from Western literary theory while identifying the intricate historical sources of these terms and analyzing their relevance to other disciplines and ideas. The result shows how these words function as heterogeneous cultural contexts in the complexity of experience but also how they function within the context of Chinese culture as well as Chinese literature and criticism. In this volume, the editors focus on discourse, text, narrative, literariness and irony from the perspectives of etymology, documentation, meanings and other core factors. Students of literature and languages, and especially Chinese literature, will benefit from this two-volume set.