Redefining Chinese Literature And Art

This Key Concepts pivot discusses the significance of the ancient Chinese concept of xìng or ‘Association’ in defining Chinese civilization and thought through the centuries. An approach unique to literary creation in China, xìng highlights the importance Chinese civilization sets by the integration of intellect, emotion and will into a highly consistent concept across its personal and public spheres. The book explores how the concept has been a widely used creative technique even in the earliest collections of Chinese poems, using metaphor and symbolism to set the scene and indicate thoughts and emotions invested in the vehicle of metaphor, as well as its impact on Chinese literature and philosophy as a domain of multiple meanings in classical Chinese aesthetics.

A redefinition of contemporary Chinese art from the last forty years in the context of unprecedented cultural, political, and urban transformation, written by an authority on the subject. Contemporary Chinese art is a subject of sustained and growing significance in present-day culture across the globe. This new volume in the World of Art series reframes Chinese art since the end of China’s Cultural Revolution more than four decades ago, placing it in the context of the nation’s unprecedented cultural, political, and urban transformation. Based on original research by writer, curator, and leading scholar in the field of contemporary Chinese art, Jiang Jiehong, this volume explores the area through firsthand materials and in-depth interviews with more than thirty artists. Providing the most up-to-date understanding of contemporary Chinese art, Jiang includes a variety of media, ranging from painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography to installation, video, performance, and participatory art. Featuring over 150 color images of artworks by more than fifty internationally renowned Chinese artists, including Ai Weiwei and Zhang Peili, as well as emerging artists, such as Zhao Zhao, The Art of Contemporary China presents a wide variety of practices through curatorial discussions and images of original installation views and historical art events. What emerges are revelations on art, and new insights into contemporary China. Fulfilling a need for an accessible, affordable introduction to contemporary Chinese art, this volume offers a concise but far-reaching survey of the movement.

Through analyses of a wide range of Chinese literary and visual texts from the beginning of the twentieth century through the contemporary period, the thirteen essays in this volume challenge the view that canonical and popular culture are self-evident and diametrically opposed categories, and instead argue that the two cultural sensibilities are inextricably bound up with one another. An international line up of contributors present detailed analyses of literary works and other cultural products that have previously been neglected by scholars, while also examining more familiar authors and works from provocative new angles.The essays include investigations into the cultural industries and contexts that produce the canonical and popular, the position of contemporary popular works at the interstices of nostalgia and amnesia, and also the ways in which cultural texts are inflected with gendered and erotic sensibilities while at the same time also functioning as objects of desire in its own right. As the only volume of its kind to cover the entire span of the 20th century, and also to consider the interplay of popular and canonical literature in modern China with comparable rigor, Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture is an important resource for students and scholars of Chinese literature and culture.

In a YA thriller that is Crazy Rich Asians meets One of Us is Lying, students at an elite prep school are forced to confront their secrets when their ex-best friend turns up dead. Nancy Luo is shocked when her former best friend, Jamie Ruan, top-ranked junior at Sinclair Prep, goes missing, and then is found dead. Nancy is even more shocked when word starts to spread that she and her friends--Krystal, Akil, and Alexander--are the prime suspects, thanks to "the Proctor," someone anonymously incriminating them via the school's social media app. They all used to be Jamie's closest friends, and she knew each of their deepest, darkest secrets. Now, somehow the Proctor knows them, too. The four must uncover the true killer before The Proctor exposes more than they can bear and costs them more than they can afford, like Nancy's full scholarship. Soon, Nancy suspects that her friends may be keeping secrets from her, too. Katie Zhao's YA debut is an edge-of-your-seat drama set in the pressure-cooker world of academics and image at Sinclair Prep, where the past threatens the future these teens have carefully crafted for themselves. How We Fall Apart is the irresistible, addicting, Asian-American recast of Gossip Girl that we've all been waiting for.

This book bridges comparative literature and American studies by using an intercultural and bilingual approach to Chinese American literature. King-Kok Cheung launches a new transnational exchange by examining both Chinese and Chinese American writers. Part 1 presents alternative forms of masculinity that transcend conventional associations of valor with aggression. It examines gender refashioning in light of the Chinese dyadic ideal of wen-wu (verbal arts and martial arts), while redefining both in the process. Part 2 highlights the writers’ formal innovations by presenting alternative autobiography, theory, metafiction, and translation. In doing so, Cheung puts in relief the literary experiments of the writers, who interweave hybrid poetics with two-pronged geopolitical critiques. The writers examined provide a reflexive lens through which transpacific audiences are beckoned to view the “other” country and to look homeward without blinders.

Translating Chinese Art and Modern Literature examines issues in cross-cultural dialogue in connection with translation and modern Chinese art and literature from interdisciplinary perspectives. This comprises the text-image dialogue in the context of Chinese modernity, and cross-cultural interaction between modern literature in Chinese and other literatures. This edited collection approaches these issues with discrete foci and approaches, and the ten chapters in this volume are to be divided into two distinct parts. The first part highlights the mutual effects between literary texts and visual images in the media of book, painting, and film, and the second part includes contributions by scholars of literary translation.

The multi-dimensional model of cross-cultural research was put forward as an alternative to the model of Sino-western dualism which sees China and the West as two entirely different entities. In order to break with this dualistic model, the spatial dimension should be separated from the temporal dimension, allowing the words “China” and “the West” to recover their original meaning of spatial dimensions. This, in turn, reconceptualises the equal relationship between China and the West, and seeks the possibilities and pathways of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue in a global context. This book is composed of two parts: the spatial dimension of cross-cultural research and the temporal dimension of cross-cultural research. The first discusses globalization and China’s cultural identity; cross-cultural literary research between China and the West; a circular model of cross-cultural research focusing on literary adaptations; integrating Chinese literature into world literature; appreciating Chinese poetry from a cross-cultural perspective; and the three models of nature appreciation. In part two, the book explores the Book of Changes (周易) from the perspective of modern aesthetics; original Confucianism, literary theory and aesthetics; the Han dynasty’s Confucianism, literary theory and aesthetics; New-Confucianism, literary theory and aesthetic; Beijing city’s culture; and China’s short film and socialistic cultural productions.