The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction

The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction
Author: Mau-sang Ng
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1988-08-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780887068812

The Russian influence took root in the Chinese intellectual tradition that evolved after the Literary Revolution of 1917. When the Chinese communists turned to Russia for their inspiration they also accepted the Russian version of the novel’s form and function in society. However, they did not accept it uncritically. Chinese understanding of the arts goes back for thousands of years and thus Chinese intellectuals brought their own kinds of tradition and intelligence to these new arts and political solutions. In this lucid study, the author demonstrates how Chinese writers, guided by Russian authors such as Chekhov, Turgenev, and Andreyev, created works of art that are both original and Chinese. However, he also shows that the familiar heroes of such famous novelists as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Mao Dun, and Ba Jin have a strong Russian flavor linked to prototypes in the Russian literary tradition. The author depicts the fortune of Soviet literature and the fate of the intellectual hero in the People’s Republic of China. He believes that the humanistic May Fourth intellectual tradition, which inspired enthusiasm for classical Russian literature, has been revived with the publication of works like Dai Houying’s Man ah, Man! and Zhao Zhenkai’s Waves.

The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature

The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature
Author: Mark Gamsa
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2008-08-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9047443276

The important place of Russian literature in China is widely acknowledged. To better understand the processes of its translation, transmission and interpretation during the first half of the 20th century, this book draws on an array of Chinese and Russian sources, providing insight into the interplay of political ideologies, cultural trends, commercial forces, and the self-definition of Chinese culture in the period under consideration. By focusing on the translation and translators of three writers, Boris Savinkov, Mikhail Artsybashev and Leonid Andreev, it analyzes the critical fortune in China of the modernist literature written in Russia during the two decades preceding the Great War and Revolution. Offering a thorough study of Lu Xun, the most important Chinese author of the 20th century, as a reader, translator and interpreter of Russian literature, this book also displays the variety of the groups and persons involved in the introduction of foreign literature, going beyond shopworn generalizations about “East” and “West” to make meaningful statements about a complex period in Chinese history.

The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China

The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China
Author: Sally Taylor Lieberman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 1998
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780813917900

A modernist icon, an object of forbidden desire, a symbol of loss and suffering, and an incorrigible survivor - the mother takes all of these forms in Chinese literature from the 1920s and 1930s. In an innovative analysis, Sally Taylor Lieberman explores the meanings the maternal figure acquired at a particular place and time and then engages those meanings in a feminist rereading of the master narratives of modern Chinese intellectual and literary history. Drawing on feminist literary criticism and the theories of Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, and Sigmund Freud, Lieberman breaks traditional analytical boundaries as she explores the place of the mother in the ideological struggles through which the modern Chinese canon attained its present shape.

Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer

Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer
Author: Wendy Larson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1991
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Throughout the twentieth century, Chinese writers have confronted the problem of creating a new literary tradition that both maintains the culturally unique aspects of a rich heritage and succeeds in promoting a new modernity. In the first book-length treatment of the topic, Wendy Larson examines the contradictory forms of authority at work in the autobiographical texts of modern Chinese writers and scholars and the way these conflicts helped to shape and determine the manner in which writers viewed themselves, their texts, and their work. Larson focuses on the most famous writers associated with the May Fourth Movement, a group most active in the 1920s and 1930s, and their fundamental ambivalence about writing. She analyzes how their writing paradoxically characterized textual labor as passive, negative, and inferior to material labor and the more physical political work of social progress, and she describes the ways they used textual means to devalue literary labor. The impact of China's increasing contact with the West--particularly the ways in which Western notions of "individualism" and "democracy" influenced Chinese ideologies of self and work--is considered. Larson also studies the changes in China's social structure, notably those linked to the abolition in 1905 of the educational exam system, which subsequently broke the link between the mastery of certain texts and the attainment of political power, further denigrating the cultural role of the writer.

The A to Z of Modern Chinese Literature

The A to Z of Modern Chinese Literature
Author: Li-Hua Ying
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2010
Genre: Authors, Chinese
ISBN: 0810876140

The A to Z of Modern Chinese Literature presents a broad perspective on the development and history of literature in modern China. It offers a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Chinese literature.

Translation’s Forgotten History

Translation’s Forgotten History
Author: Heekyoung Cho
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2020-05-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684175690

Translation’s Forgotten History investigates the meanings and functions that translation generated for modern national literatures during their formative period and reconsiders literature as part of a dynamic translational process of negotiating foreign values. By examining the triadic literary and cultural relations among Russia, Japan, and colonial Korea and revealing a shared sensibility and literary experience in East Asia (which referred to Russia as a significant other in the formation of its own modern literatures), this book highlights translation as a radical and ineradicable part—not merely a catalyst or complement—of the formation of modern national literature. Translation’s Forgotten History thus rethinks the way modern literature developed in Korea and East Asia. While national canons are founded on amnesia regarding their process of formation, framing literature from the beginning as a process rather than an entity allows a more complex and accurate understanding of national literature formation in East Asia and may also provide a model for world literature today.

Modern China and the West

Modern China and the West
Author: Hsiao-yen PENG
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2014-04-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004270221

In Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation, the authors investigate the significant role translation plays in the act of cultural mediation. They pay attention to transnational organizations that bring about cross-cultural interactions as well as regulating authorities, in the form of both nation-states and ideologies, which dictate what, and even how, to translate. Under such circumstances, is there room for individual translators or mediators to exercise their free will? To what extent are they allowed to do so? The authors see translation as a "shaping force." While intending to shape, or reshape, certain concepts through the translating act, translators and cultural actors need to negotiate among multifarious institutional powers that coexist, including traditional and foreign. Contributors include: Françoise Kreissler, Angel Pino, Shan Te-hsing, Nicolai Volland, Joyce C. H. Liu, Huang Ko-wu, Isabelle Rabut, Xiaomei Chen, Zhang Yinde, Peng Hsiao-yen, Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, and Pin-chia Feng.

Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature

Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature
Author: Li-hua Ying
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 825
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1538130068

Modern Chinese literature has been flourishing for over a century, with varying degrees of intensity and energy at different junctures of history and points of locale. An integral part of world literature from the moment it was born, it has been in constant dialogue with its counterparts from the rest of the world. As it has been challenged and enriched by external influences, it has contributed to the wealth of literary culture of the entire world. In terms of themes and styles, modern Chinese literature is rich and varied; from the revolutionary to the pastoral, from romanticism to feminism, from modernism to post-modernism, critical realism, psychological realism, socialist realism, and magical realism. Indeed, it encompasses a full range of ideological and aesthetic concerns. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature presents a broad perspective on the development and history of literature in modern China. It offers a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Chinese literature.