Fictional Authors Imaginary Audiences

The authors and audiences for 20th century Chinese literature, especially fiction, are examined in a fresh light. While modern Chinese fictions are imaginary in that they do not constitute reliable portraits of Chinese life, they offer insights into the writers themselves and their implied audiences.

In the 1980s China’s politicians, writers, and academics began to raise an increasingly urgent question: why had a Chinese writer never won a Nobel Prize for literature? Promoted to the level of official policy issue and national complex, Nobel anxiety generated articles, conferences, and official delegations to Sweden. Exiled writer Gao Xingjian’s win in 2000 failed to satisfactorily end the matter, and the controversy surrounding the Nobel committee’s choice has continued to simmer. Julia Lovell’s comprehensive study of China’s obsession spans the twentieth century and taps directly into the key themes of modern Chinese culture: national identity, international status, and the relationship between intellectuals and politics. The intellectual preoccupation with the Nobel literature prize expresses tensions inherent in China’s move toward a global culture after the collapse of the Confucian world-view at the start of the twentieth century, and particularly since China’s re-entry into the world economy in the post-Mao era. Attitudes toward the prize reveal the same contradictory mix of admiration, resentment, and anxiety that intellectuals and writers have long felt toward Western values as they struggled to shape a modern Chinese identity. In short, the Nobel complex reveals the pressure points in an intellectual community not entirely sure of itself. Making use of extensive original research, including interviews with leading contemporary Chinese authors and critics, The Politics of Cultural Capital is a comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of an issue that cuts to the heart of modern and contemporary Chinese thought and culture. It will be essential reading for scholars of modern Chinese literature and culture, globalization, post-colonialism, and comparative and world literature.

Through a study of the readership of the most popular commercial daily newspaper in China during the early twentieth century, Reading Shenbao investigates ideas of nationalism, consumerism and individuality, looking at the relationship between advertising, modern lifestyles and changing social attitudes in China as it underwent modernization.

Presenting an array of cutting edge perspectives on modern Chinese literature in different Sinophone contexts, this volume of essays offers a wide range of critical approaches to the study of an emerging interdisciplinary field.

Drawing on the cognitive translatological paradigm, this book introduces a situation-embedded cognitive construction model of translation and explores the thinking portfolios of British and American sinologists-cum-translators to re-examine their multiple voices and cognition in translating Chinese fiction. By placing sinologists-cum-translators in the same discourse space, the study transcends the limitations of previous case studies and offers a comprehensive cognitive panorama of how Chinese novels are rendered. The author explores the challenges and difficulties of translating Chinese fiction from the insider perspectives of British and American sinologists, and cross-validates their multiple voices by aligning them with cross-cultural communication scenarios. Based on the cognitive construction model of translation, the book provides a systematic review of the translation thoughts and ideas of the community of sinologists in terms of linguistic conventions, narrative styles, contextual and cultural frames, readership categories and metaphorical models of translation. It envisions a new research path to enhance empirical research on translators' cognition in a dynamic translation ecosystem. The title will be an essential read for students and scholars of translation studies and Chinese studies. It will also appeal to translators and researchers interested in cognitive stylistics, literary studies and intercultural communication studies.

Although Lu Xun was a leading intellectual and writer in twentieth century China, and his representative character Ah Q, hero of "The True Story of Ah Q," is considered an iconic repository of progressive Chinese thinking about the national character, few works examine the major discourses in his thought and writing relative to broader historical and intellectual currents outside the context of his politicization. Ah Q Archaeology, however, concretely situates Lu Xun's critique of national character vis-a-vis metanarratives of nationalism and modernity through a close examination of his works in their historical context. Paul B. Foster uses a discursive approach to tie together Lu Xun's major theme of national character critique and its fate in China's tumultuous twentieth century. This book is an important and unique contribution to modern Chinese intellectual history and modern Chinese literature.

This wide-ranging Companion provides a vital overview of modern Chinese literature in different geopolitical areas, from the 1840s to now. It reviews major accomplishments of Chinese literary scholarship published in Chinese and English and brings attention to previously neglected, important areas. Offers the most thorough and concise coverage of modern Chinese literature to date, drawing attention to previously neglected areas such as late Qing, Sinophone, and ethnic minority literature Several chapters explore literature in relation to Sinophone geopolitics, regional culture, urban culture, visual culture, print media, and new media The introduction and two chapters furnish overviews of the institutional development of modern Chinese literature in Chinese and English scholarship since the mid-twentieth century Contributions from leading literary scholars in mainland China and Hong Kong add their voices to international scholarship

A history of the translation, transmission and interpretation of modernist Russian literature in China during the first half of the 20th century, this book views modern Chinese literary culture from an original and revealing perspective. It is the first English-language study of the subject to draw on sources in both Russian and Chinese, and it also shows the crucial role of English, German and Japanese translations in mediating knowledge of Russian literature in China.