A Historical Study Of Early Modern Chinese Fictions 1890 1920

This book contains a classic guide to historical study of early modern Chinese fiction from the late Qing Dynasty till early republican China. It does not merely study the new fiction writing in China, which was strongly influenced by the western fiction, but also draws a comparison between classical Chinese fiction and the early modern Chinese fiction. This book is an excellent reference in the study of early modern Chinese literature since it conveys a point of view to the readers with abundant and solid historical materials. At the heart of the book, it is the matter of a specific value in trans-cultural studies between the western world and China.

This book contains a classic guide to historical study of early modern Chinese fiction from the late Qing Dynasty till early republican China. It does not merely study the new fiction writing in China, which was strongly influenced by the western fiction, but also draws a comparison between classical Chinese fiction and the early modern Chinese fiction. This book is an excellent reference in the study of early modern Chinese literature since it conveys a point of view to the readers with abundant and solid historical materials. At the heart of the book, it is the matter of a specific value in trans-cultural studies between the western world and China.

First published in 1961, and reissued in new editions several times, this is the pioneering, classic study of 20th-century Chinese fiction. The book covers some 60 years, from the Literary Revolution of 1917 through the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. C. T. Hsia, Prof. Emeritus of Chinese at Columbia Univ., examines the major writers from Lu Hsun to Eileen Chang and representative works since 1949 from both mainland China and Taiwan. The first serious study of modern Chinese fiction in English, this book is also the best study of its subject available. Not only the specialist, but every reader who is interested in China or in literature will find it of interest. Hsia's astute insights and graceful writing make the book enjoyable as well as deeply edifying.

A Brief History of Chinese Fiction grew out of the lecture notes Lu Hsun used when teaching a course on Chinese fiction at Peking University between 1920 and 1924. In December 1923 a first volume was printed and in June 1924 a second volume. In September 1925 these were reprinted as one book. In 1930 the author made certain changes, but all subsequent editions have remained the same.

A Complete Guide to Literary Analysis and Theory offers an accessible introduction to all the current approaches to literary analysis. Ranging from stylistics and historicism to post-humanism and new materialism, it also includes chapters on media studies and screen studies. The Guide is designed for use in introductory literature courses and as a primer in theory courses. Each chapter summarizes the main ideas of each approach to the study of literature in clear prose, providing lucid introductions to the practice of each school, and conducts readings using classic and modern works of literature from around the world. The book draws on examples from a wide range of works from classics such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Shakespeare's King Lear to contemporary works such as Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb." This wide-ranging introduction is ideal for students encountering literary study for the first time, as well as more advanced students who need a concise summary of critical methods. It strives to make complex ideas simple and provides readings that undergraduates should be able to understand and enjoy as well as training them to conduct analyses of their own.

This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”

This collection of essays reveals the dynamic role of the late Qing novel in the process of modernization of Chinese fiction. Substantial changes in various aspects of the Chinese novel at the turn of the century, demonstrated by structural analyses of several representative novels, suggest that the evolution of modern Chinese fiction was a more complex process than a simple imitation of Western literatures. The results challenge the scholarly consensus that modern Chinese fiction resulted from a radical change brought about by the May Fourth Movement in 1919. It is demonstrated rather that the transformation had already begun in the first decade of the twentieth century and that the conspicuous changes in Chinese fiction of the 1920s represent a culmination rather than a beginning of the modern evolutionary process. The book consists of nine studies which analyse the late Qing novel in its general and specific aspects. The introduction and first essay explain how social changes conditioned cultural and literary changes during the period and how the resultant new theory of fiction generated new concepts of a politically engaged novel. The two following studies develop a general statement of narrative structures and devices, derived from structural analyses of seven outstanding late Qing novels. The last six articles examine particular novels in detail, focusing on the specific fictional techniques which predominate in each. This is the first volume in a new series, Modern East Asian Studies.