A certain dispute that arose during the early Jin dynasty regarding Bai Juyi that seemed to be a coincidental occurrence was to some extent inevitable. On one hand, it foreshadowed the opposition that would later arise between followers of the Tang and Song stylistic schools; on the other, it represented both the Tang school poets’ disdain for the “ornamental avant-garde” poetry that was fashionable at the time as well as their own search for a new creative direction. The re-evaluation of Bai Juyi that occurred during that period, particularly the frequent comparison of Bai to Tao Yuanming, indicates that Bai Juyi’s poetry was widely accepted at the time, which itself represented not only a challenge to traditional perspectives, but also a historical landmark in Bai Juyi’s history of acceptance. Jin dynasty poets’ creative imitation of Bai Juyi’s carefree as well as his satirical poems spurred a maturation of Bai’s spirit of concern for self and reality, which later incorporated itself into the spirit of Chinese literati in general.

In the 1920s, the Japanese scholar Naito Konan put forward the famous theories of “the Song dynasty is the beginning of modern China” and “the cultural transformation was completed during the Tang and Song dynasties,” which exerted far-reaching influence in the academic circle. However, although full of the “numerous academic growth points and exuberant academic vitality, the theories have not been well explored and illustrated yet.”1 This paper, taking Liu Yong as a case study, is intended to provide concrete examples to Naito’s theories. The urban narrative in Liu Yong’s lyrics—the multi-role discourse practice of a prodigal poet, a talented lyricist, and a traveling official—inherited the discourse splitting trend of the late-Tang and Five dynasties and finished the transformation from the elite to the mass discourse. Accordingly, it set the narrative mode of amorous themes and discourse mode of “talented lyricist plus amorous affairs,” which exerted far-reaching influence on the construction of the new urban culture in the Song dynasty.

The cane is a frequent subject in Song Literature. Its tremendous variety is starting. Meanwhile, cane-related materials, costumes, circumstances and activities reflect distinct inclination, carrying rich cultural and aesthetic implications. From the “cane literature,” we see clearly the evolution of worldviews, values, aesthetic tastes and literary claims of Song writers, as well as the selective inheritance of Song culture from preceding literatures. It can be concluded that, in a certain sense, the cane of ancient Chinese writers embodies a history of literature, of aesthetic, and of philosophy.

This essay talks about a significant moment in Chinese intellectual and literary history, centrally involving the nature of human happiness, which remains one of the great questions in all philosophical traditions. The Northern Song version of this question continues to have resonance in the contemporary world because we often still link happiness with particular situations and often, like our Northern Song predecessors, with particular sites and possessions. These questions can indeed be found earlier in the Chinese tradition, but in the major social transformations of the Northern Song—a growing commercial culture, and an elite defined by cultural prestige rather than by family background—this question came to enjoy a new intensity of discursive reflection.

The description concerning the foreign affairs and exotic imagination in the vernacular fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties, in a way, reveal the Chinese people’s vision of the world, which does not only lend a vivid note on the contemporaneous Sino-foreign relationship and its challenge to the traditional society, but also provides an interesting proof for attesting the “others’ perspective” found at the core of contemporary culture theory. This text expounds the historical and cultural contexts of such description and imagination, especially those of Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand. It makes clear that the exotic areas described in fiction do not necessarily equal to those of real countries existing now. Only after the Qing dynasty, did Chinese fiction begin to give clear features of foreign countries and fully exhibit their literary values. So the change of exotic imagination is the landmark between ancient and modern fictions.

Compared with pure literature, Liu Cixin’s science fiction novels show a high degree of novelty. Due to his creative accommodation of third world experience and the Chinese cultural spirit of the 1950–70s, he is able to challenge the universal hegemony of the Enlightenment. The deep feelings of Liu Cixin’s novels come from the “guerrilla” character of third world intellectuals who resisted colonization and guarded the country, a resistance derived from China’s vanguard position in the third world independence movement. Liu Cixin’s continuous writing of the story of weakness over power is not only a response to China’s modern and contemporary situation, but also a borrowing from the revolutionary experience to imagine the possibility of another world for readers of the post-revolutionary era.

Imagination is the lifeline of science fiction. In the 20th century, Chinese science fiction has produced the three distinct imagination modes of desire, possibility, and principles, conveyed through at least five expression techniques in neologisms, verisimilitude, temporal disjunction, situational extremes, and metaphorization. Although imagination is critical to the creation of science fiction, there are polarized views about its nature. A necessary task for the future development of Chinese science fiction is challenging false conceptions of imagination so as to establish more imagination modes.

This essay aims to analyze the types of the historical plays during the War of Resistance Against Japan, reasons for the prosperity of this particular type of play and the historical background. The focus is put on the success of “the historical plays of uniting the chaotic country” by Guo Moruo, “the historical plays of the national crisis” by Aying and Yao Ke and “the historical plays of the peasant uprisings” by Yang Hansheng. The wartime left-wing writers showed great concern for the country and in their works, there are both the political implication of using the past to satirize the present and the complex humanistic feelings. More importantly, the double tragedies of the history and the humanity in these plays remarkably pushed the development of the art of tragedy in China.

This article seeks to reinterpret Wang Zengqi’s (汪曾祺, 1920-97) novels written in the early and mid‐1980s. Through a historical lens, the author examines the era immediately following China’s reform and opening‐up when the political ideal of “distribution according to work” (anlao fenpei) had met with social realities at that time. Departing from the mainstream approach to Wang Zengqi, which oversimplifies China’s process of reforms and opening and consequently reduces Wang Zengqi’s literature to a “pure literature” devoid of social implications, a lyricism of individuals, and a depiction of depoliticized everyday life, this article lays emphasis on the interconnection between Wang Zengqi’s time and his writings. By analyzing the forms and styles of Wang’s novels, the author endeavors to place his writings back in their historical context as a means of rediscovering their underlying meanings and politics hitherto neglected by the scholarship on Chinese literature from the 1980s. Therefore, this article refutes the misconception of Wang Zengqi being a “small writer” and acknowledges the writer’s “bigness” in his writing. In fact, big writers like Wang Zengqi are indispensable in the conception of new political worlds under any historical condition.

Although James Joyce and Lu Xun were both writing at a time when a new nation was being created out of former empire, little has been written about the extraordinary synchronicities of their early careers or their common mission. Both understood a new nation must first be created in the hearts and minds of its people. Coming from a medical background, each regarded their countrymen as sick in spirit, paralyzed by slavish dependencies. Joyce saw such servility as fostered by Ireland’s long colonization under the British Crown, a subservience seconded by the “tyranny” of the Roman Catholic Church. For Lu Xun, this spiritual paralysis manifested itself as a legacy of the Confucianism of the late Qing dynasty. Working from a medical model, both writers present a detailed, precise, and cold account of the speech of their characters to reveal the true nature of their disease-while allowing the reader to reach his own diagnosis. By means of this new kind of narrative, both James Joyce and Lu Xun sought to liberate the “soul” or “spirit” of their people, granting them a voice of their own which itself clarified to what extent they had been conscripted by the words of others.

In the view of the relation between science fiction and social reality, the core question of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy is the clash of civilizations between human and Trisolaran, which causes the future possibility of the end of human history. The narrative perspectives of the trilogy are the intelligentsia narrative by Wang Miao (The Three-Body Problem), the heroic narrative by Luo Ji (The Three-Body Problem II: The Dark Forest), and the narrative of “the last man” by Cheng Xin (The Three-Body Problem III: Death’s End). If the future civilization of the human beings is likely to encounter the cosmic catastrophe which is caused by the clash of civilizations between human and aliens, contemporary human elite have to rethink the values of morality and civilization, and bravely creating new history of human by rejecting the temptation of era of the end of history.

Jin Shengtan wrote his commentaries to the novel Water Margin (Shuihuzhuan) between 1641 and 1644, during the final years before the fall of the Ming dynasty. These commentaries are exceptional at least in part because they reflect Jin’s frustrations that came from trying to understand this period of chaos. But they are also a good example of how fiction commentary helped to shape the trajectory that the development of Chinese fiction would take, in the form of commentaries and sequels. This article offers a reading of Jin’s commentaries to his 70-chapter edition of the Water Margin, to investigate how Jin radically reshaped the Water Margin as the masterpiece of a commentator of great literary genius. It analyses Jin’s rhetoric of controlling interpretation and concludes that Jin’s ultimate goal was to stabilize and prevent tampering of his “original” 70-chapter edition, in an attempt to close off future possibilities of “sequeling” the Water Margin.

The development of Chinese literary genres is largely a history of dissociation and integration. Ci and shi are closely associated at all times, separated at one time, and fused with each other at others. A brief survey of dissociation and integration of ci and shi falls into four periods: 1) starting from the early to the mid-late Tang Dynasty (Tang Chao Ug CE 618–907), when ci was derived from shi and no distinction existed between the two; 2) the late Tang Dynasty and the following Five Dynasties (Wu Dai N擭? CE 907–960), during which ci was separated and known from shi; 3) the Northern Song Dynasty (Bei Song S[? CE 960–1127), when ci developed and experienced a transform and took an initial inosculation into shi; and 4) the Southern Song Dynasty (Nan Song SW[? CE 1127–1279), when ci was shifted completely to shi (poetry) and the two were thoroughly merged.

The source, evolution, application and characteristics of the Chinese concept “zhishi fenzi” 知识分子 are well worth further exploration. Meanwhile, the development and meaning of the Western concept “intellectual” throughout the history are discussed in the article to provide better understanding of its historical evolution and theoretical researches, and to reveal misunderstanding and mistaken views about this concept in China’s academic circles. The disparity between the concept of “zhishi fenzi” in China and in the West lies in not only the history of concept but also that of thought whereas the translation of “intellectual” into “zhishi fenzi” is the problem of understanding. The concept history of “zhishi fenzi” clearly shows that it is a self-contained notion that can stand alone with its Chinese source and characteristics.

The author of this paper attempts to make a detailed analysis of the impact the notion of the cultural turn exerted upon the translation studies at home, and to explore the historical elements of the notion and its inevitability of the emergence. The author also intends, at the conclusion of the paper, to present his view on the broad vista that the notion of the cultural turn has opened up the new areas for the current translation studies.

After Lu Xun published “A Madman’s Diary” (Kuangren riji) and “The True Story of Ah Q” (A Q zhengzhuan), through the active introduction by modern Korean mass media, Lu Xun enjoyed the highest popularity of all modern Chinese literary author in Korea Peninsula. “A Madman’s Diary” translated by Ryu Sooin, was published in the magazine Donggwang (The oriental light) in 1927. Yang Baekhwa’s translation of “The True Story of Ah Q” was serialized in The Chosun Ilbo (The Korea daily) in 1930. “Lu Xun and His Works” by Jeong Raedong, who conduct systematic criticism on Lu Xun’s literature, was published in The Korea Daily in 1931. Lu Xun was thus differentiated from the so-called “Zhou Brothers” and claimed a place of his own as a representative Chinese writer. After that, Lu Xun’s various works were translated into Korean, and he was acknowledged as “a Chinese literary master” and “a world-class writer” in the Korean literary world. Lu Xun’s literature was hence widely acknowledged. Lee Kwangsoo even created another character called “Park Seondal” based on the motif of “Ah Q.” With the development of mass media, people were eager to see Lu Xun’s personal image. In the 1930s, major Korean media, such as The Shin Dong-a (The new East Asia), The Dong-a Ilbo (The East Asia daily), The Chosun Ilbo (The Korea daily), The Maeil Sinbo (The daily report), Chokwang (The morning light) and Samcheonli (Three thousand miles), successively published Lu Xun’s portraits and photos, helping visualize Lu Xun’s image and making great contributions to shaping the public image of Lu Xun and his literature. Through these major media in Korea, Lu Xun’s works and his reputation became widely known, and his portrait images were also circulated. In February 1938, the Hwarang Garden Troupe staged the play The True Story of Ah Q. Considering the commercial nature of the theatre at that time, the public performance of The True Story of Ah Q indicates that Lu Xun and his works had achieved a solid foothold in the public mind. However, Korean people’s access to Lu Xun’s literature was blocked after March 1938, when Japanese imperialists imposed a blanket ideological clampdown. With the advent of liberation on August 15, 1945, the modern Korean public strongly needed Lu Xun’s life experience and literary spirit as enlightenment. Hence, translation and research of Lu Xun’s literary works became active again. In particular, in 1946, after the publication of The Collected Short Stories of Lu Xun (Volumes 1-2), jointly translated by Kim Kwangju and Lee Yongkyu, which included Lu Xun’s major works, Korean people were able to gain a more systematic access to Lu Xun’s literature. The inspirational value of Lu Xun’s literature was re-ignited after Korea’s liberation and independence. Lu Xun was thus once again praised as “a literary giant” and “a great writer.”

This article provides an existentialist reading of Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem (Santi). Luo Ji, with the chance/miracle of Trisolaran invasion, got rid of the unreal status and became the self-conscious existence and the hero who protected the mankind by his decisiveness and responsibilities. However, he gained terror and hostility from human. Eventually, human civilization was extinct because of the rejection to the heroes. The Three-Body Problem showed Liu Cixin’s endeavor to revive heroism in the contexts of China and the world, but also represented the writer’s confusion as a symptom of the era when he was dealing with the ideological theme of hero and the common people.

This paper examines the layered nostalgia embodied by one specific spatiotemporal site, the war‐torn Republican capital of Nanjing, in Bai Xianyong’s 1971 collection of short stories Taipei People and in Ye Zhaoyan’s 1996 novel Nanjing 1937: A Love Story. Both Nanjing’s historical reputation as an ancient capital for several short‐lived dynasties and its special role in narrating Chinese identity and cultural traditions across the 1949 divide contribute to the city’s symbolic significance in the literary tradition of ruin gazing. In the two texts under discussion, the layered ruins of Republican Nanjing—reminiscent of the decadent Six Dynasties (220–589) and witnessing the historical violence and physical as well as metaphorical dislocation resulting from World War II and the Chinese Civil War—constitute an ideal site for reflecting upon not only personal and national traumas but also traditional‐modern tensions from diversified stances and angles. The related but divergent trajectories taken by Bai’s and Ye’s nostalgic gaze—one projected from the United States in the 1960s by way of post‐1949 Taipei and the other geographically located in contemporary Nanjing but culturally distanced from it—form an interesting dialogue, which may shed light on the fluidity of ruin gazing at a nexus of identity questions with reference to the embrace of modernity.

The time-travel genre of Chinese Internet literature combines old mythological motifs with contemporary science fiction approaches to create a narrative line in which the protagonist travels through time, undergoes a series of trials, discovers new worlds, and realizes an idealized life. Borrowing Foucault’s theory of utopian bodies and heterotopias and taking Tianxia Guiyuan’s female-oriented Internet novel Empress Fuyao as its exemplary case, this study analyzes how time-travel fiction uses time travel in order to image a “utopia” and what kind of “new world” is projected by this utopia. In the process, this paper will simultaneously examine the relationship between utopia and twenty-first century China’s new media literature.

Lu Xun situated himself at the crossroads of agricultural tradition and modernist inception during the tumultuous Republican period. As a result, fraught with his affection towards his origins and aiming to register his modernist sensibilities, he widely scattered various animals throughout his fiction and essays. However, more scholarly attention should be paid to the theoretical interpretations of these nonhuman historical and affective agencies and they deserve to be regarded as unique references to the social and political representations of the Republican era. This paper analyzes how Lu Xun represents animal images and discusses the relationship between animality and humanity in his writings. Employing eco-criticism and Foucauldian bio-politics, I argue that the animalistic reading of “A Madman’s Diary” contrasts with the conventional cannibalistic reading and marks a revolutionary beginning to Lu Xun’s concern towards animality and humanity. Later echoing with the social Darwinism popular at the time, Lu Xun invests more nuanced affects in three different categories of animals through which he contemplates domestication, vulnerability, and self-definition. Finally, I argue that by inventing a discourse of animality and humanity, Lu Xun casts his pioneering gaze on Chinese morality, modern subjectivity, and the natural environment.

Chinese science fiction (sf) writer Liu Cixin (b. 1963) has constantly been dubbed as China’s Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) ever since he won the 2015 Hugo Award for best novel. He himself humbly states on several occasions that everything he writes is just clumsy imitations of Arthur C. Clarke. One similarity between Liu and Clarke is the obsession with the imagination of the alien encounter. But their imagination of the alien other has one major difference: While the aliens in Clarke’s sf are mostly benevolent, those in Liu’s are mostly malevolent. This essay compares the differences between their alien encounter sf, focusing on Childhood’s End and The Three-Body Trilogy (Santi sanbuqu). I will especially look at how the narrative point of view and the consequence of the alien encounter differ in the two texts. And I argue that Childhood’s End is an unapologetic justification of (British) colonialism (dressed up as the benevolent Overlords) and propaganda for colonial logics, whereas Liu’s trilogy is a representation of the colonial encounter story written from the point of view of the (semi-) colonized, for whom this experience is characterized by dehumanization. The Three-Body Trilogy could be considered as resulted from the revival of the national humiliation discourse in the 1990s.

The complex space of cities exerted a profound and far-reaching influence on traditional Chinese fiction writing. Starting from the description of city spaces, particularly urban landmarks, as the backdrop for stories and ranging through the urban political culture of political struggles, power symbols, the selection of talent, and festivals and carnivals to the daily life of city dwellers with their dreams of prosperity, legendary love stories and inner yearning for justice , the cities of traditional Chinese fiction offer us a picture that goes far beyond the merely geographic to show political and cultural indicators and the content s of daily life. Such descriptions created vivid and distinct city images that in turn became the common life experience and cultural imagination of urban dwellers and offered a common cultural identity and standpoint for those living in the same city.

This paper examines the performative significance of Lu Xun’s historical short stories collected in Gushi xinbian (Old stories retold, 1936) by focusing on the mediality of his idiosyncratic writing, which he himself called “facetious.” It revisits the young Lu Xun’s uneasy engagement with medical science as student documented in his lecture notebooks bearing corrections by his teacher as well as his early essays. This provides an analytical framework for discussing the stakes of his historical fiction as a critique of the discourse of scientific historiography which was increasingly gaining currency in May Fourth China. Lu Xun’s historical fiction is conspicuously not meant to function as a stable medium between the past and the present but betrays its opaque and even arbitrary mediality, which disrupts identity in historical representation and thus critiques ideological, “cultural” power inherent in scientific discourse that tries to establish that identity. The paper then reads Gushi xinbian as attempts at recovering history from such power and envisioning new possibilities of historical transmission in the midst of an aporetic search of a prehistory of Chinese modernity—attempts hinged on anachronistic textual moments whose meanings circulate in defiance of any identity of time with itself, thereby bespeaking an alternative power to “make” history.

This essay rereads Lu Xun’s 1921 story, “Hometown,” by focusing on its nostalgic character. Against the background of a modernizing historical moment in China, the story is about a city-dweller intellectual coming back to his homeland, only to find that nothing there corresponds to his somewhat nostalgic and romantic expectations. For a long period, students of modern Chinese literature have read this story either as a critique of the feudal Chinese culture whose vestige still loomed large in rural areas at the time, or as a literary representation of Lu Xun’s hesitation toward the belief in progress embraced by those who passionately participated the cultural movement. Through a rereading of this text I argue that, instead of shedding a critical light on the economically and culturally backward rural China, here represented by the “homeland” of the protagonist, or showing his hesitation toward the New Cultural Movement, Lu Xun’s narrative of “returning home” indicates how the political radicality of the movement points toward a hope beyond program and calculation.

Going through the evolution of the body of stories about Lü Dongbin’s slaying the Yellow Dragon with a flying sword from a perspective combining the history of religion and the history of literature, this paper suggests that those stories are religious myths constructed during the prolonged rivalry between Buddhism and Taoism, and that they reflect not only the inherent conflict between the Zen theory of mind and spiritual nature (xinxing) and the theory of the integrated cultivation of spiritual nature and bodily life (xingming shuangxiu) of the interior elixir  (neidan) school of Taoism, but also the changes in Taoist theory of alchemy and in the discourse of Buddhism and Taoism. For Taoism, the meaning of the story eventually changed from cultivation in seclusion (qingxiu) to cooperative cultivation between men and women with sexual intercourse (nannü shuangxiu), and the meaning was gradually secularized as the religious backdrop of the story faded. Meanwhile, such conflict and changes not only furnished basic themes and materials for literature, but, more importantly, provided literature with means of expression, figures of speech, and power of literary construction.

Zheng Wenguang described the concept of “science fiction realism” in 1981 as a form of misreading, aiming at exploring social problems. Personally, he was rethinking and developing a series of his own writing ideas since the 1950s. As for the science fiction community, it was a powerful challenge to the idea that “science fiction is a part of popular science,” which had existed for almost five decades. As soon as Zheng’s idea was put forward, it quickly received a warm response from Jin Tao and Wei Yahua, etc. The works, such as “The Moonlight Island” (Yueguangdao) and “Destiny Nightclub” (Mingyun yezonghui), broke down the narrow boundaries of contemporary popular science discourse. “Science fiction realism” should be understood to mean “realistic science fiction.” However, from a theoretical perspective, all kinds of writings in this period not only narrowed and vulgarized the understanding of “realism,” especially as they ignored heated discussions of this concept, but also blurred the core and boundary of the “science fiction” genre and even dissolved its autonomy to a certain extent. Zheng and his proponents’ explorations are Chinese science fiction authors’ beneficial attempts to construct local traditions. They reflect a profound anxiety towards reality and a strong desire for self-identification among a generation of science fiction authors. The core point they observe reappears in various guises across the development of the science fiction genre in the following decades. The basic conceptions they are trying to convey have also become important resources for the development of Chinese science fiction literary theory.