Of the many forms of literary experimentation that arose in China during the 1980s, Can Xue’s writing stands out as some of the strangest and most enigmatic. This article intends to examine her most significant work from that period, Five Spice Street (Wuxiang jie; first published under the title Breakthrough Performance [Tuwei biaoyan]), in light of one of the major intellectual concerns in literature at the time: the question of the human. Through a close reading of the novel, I investigate the ways in which Can Xue interrogates and destabilizes the notion of the human with regard to the relationship between subject and object, corporeality, animality, sexuality, language, and time. Overall, I suggest that while Can Xue succeeds in offering a unique and provocative conceptualization of the human in Five Spice Street, she also refrains from “breaking through” the general realm of humanist discourse current at the time.

The construction of ci poetry at the joint of Ming and Qing dynasties was embodied not only in its composition and respective theories, but in its pattern and rhythm. Ci experts, represented by Wan Shu, characterizes the rise and fall of ci in the Ming dynasty, commented on Shiyu tupu 嬜OYV1 and Xiaoyu pu UxOY?, and set up the norms on ci’s composition. Such studies were mostly seen in the first thirty years of the Qing dynasty, which can be considered as an important sign of the evolution of ci poetry.

Chi Zijian’s stories connect to the origin of her life’s journey, which is the “Earth Spirit.” Such a connection renders her stories characteristic of “custom history” by demonstrating how the writer reflects reality from her own perspectives, voice, and methods of narration. The narrative style adopted by Chi Zijian is different from that of other modern stories in which nature is allowed to take its course. Chi Zijian’s short stories employ many “accidents” and “coincidences,” bringing the audience back to the storytellers’ time of Chinese classical novels. From a writing perspective, a majority of Chi Zijian’s stories are about lower-class society and are a custom history for the silent population in the north of China.

It is of great necessity to observe Lu Xun from the human-geographical or cultural geographical perspective. Even the couple of corresponding case studies are able to reveal the whole picture. The “memes” of Lu Xun existed in the tie of Lu Xun with Shaanxi province, in the existential and imaginary relationships between him and the two cities of “An” (Xi’an and Yan’an), in Lu Xun studies conducted by Shaanxi’s academic community, and in a variety of cultural events and phenomena such as Shaanxi writers’ publications, as well as conferences and calligraphy activities in Shaanxi, are hinting from the indirect aspects at the profound impacts of Lu Xun over the modern and contemporary culture in China. The transmission, reception and transformation of Lu Xun in Shaanxi during various historical stages also indicate the changes occurring to political ideology, aesthetic judgment, values and academic paradigms. To discuss Lu Xun’s “memes” in the regional culture of Shaanxi, which closely combines the region in the physical sense of cultural geography and Lu Xun study, is an important component of Lu Xun studies, as well as an effective path to delve into the research on the ties of Lu Xun with China, or even with the world, for the further attempt to comprehensively understand the significance and value of Lu Xun to the new culture in China, as well as to the modern and contemporary culture.

In recent years, “aesthetics of atmospheres,” a concept introduced from Western aesthetics, has emerged in aesthetic studies, offering a new perspective to examine ancient Chinese poetry. In poetry, atmospheric beauty is neither fixed nor rationalized; rather, it is pervasive and ubiquitous, much like a mist. Atmosphere is something spatial but primarily something emotional. Atmosphere creation is the products of a poet’s emotional expression evoked by external objects; thus, evocation (gan-xing) is a catalyst for creating atmospheres. At its core, evocation is the process by which a poet is emotionally stimulated at the sight of external objects and generates a desire to express such emotions. In this process, the poet is connected with the outside world through senses such as sight and hearing and is presented with abundant physical images. When these physical images are incorporated into poems, they become atmospheric agents. In poetry, atmospheres represent the unity of emotions and intentions. They are a poet’s situational aesthetic experiences. The statement, “If there is no self in poetry, how can we possibly have poetry” holds significant theoretical importance in aesthetics. Synesthesia plays a crucial role during the creation of atmospheric beauty in poetry. By employing synesthesia, a poet can greatly enhance the tension in poetic language, extending the poetic beauty beyond a singular sensory experience, and creating rich atmospheres that blend sensations such as sound, color, and taste.

This article examines the shifting geo-political significance of Hangzhou as presented in two local gazetteers dating from the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1276). Focusing on literary works quoted in both of these gazetteers that describe two of Hangzhou’s famous halls on West Lake, I argue that geographic discourses on these halls manifest a tension between two conflicting presentations of Hangzhou’s geo-political significance as understood by literati elite of the Southern Song. In writings concerning the Hall of Possessing Beauty (Youmei tang 有美堂), Hangzhou was viewed as a city of rising economic and cultural importance during the Northern Song. Writings on the Hall of Centrality and Harmony (Zhonghe tang 中和堂), in contrast, depict Hangzhou as an imperial refuge for a court in flight and associate it with the motif of territorial loss during the Southern Song when the city became the dynastic capital. By examining how these two views of Hangzhou are contrasted, this essay concludes that gazetteers functioned to grade and rank different kinds of landscapes in order to make geo-political arguments about the proper reconstitution of the empire during the Southern Song.

Established in the late imperial era, “one hundred beauties” (baimei) genre selected and portrayed one hundred beautiful women in Chinese history often through three cultural artifacts: woodblock print portraits, biographies, and poems. This paper takes as its focus the anthology Gujin baimei tuyong 古今百美 图咏 (Illustrated biographies of and poems on one hundred beauties of the past and the present, 1917), which has not received scholarly attention before. Bringing together collections of old and new-style beauties, the anthology is a showcase of the genre straddling two centuries. The transformation of the genre, as reflected in the Gujin baimei tuyong, complicates a simplistic distinction between tradition and modernity while enriching our understanding of the changing representations of women.

Not long after he withdrew from medical studies at Sendai and returned to Tokyo in 1906, Lu Xun began research on the history and philosophy of science, modern European thought, and comparative literature which produced five treatises he eventually published in an archaistic classical prose style influenced by that of Zhang Taiyan. Central to, and the longest among these essays is Moluo shi li shuo (On the power of Māra Poetry), which focuses on literature East and West and, in particular, the Byronic poets and their international legacy. In translating, annotating, and analyzing this essay, one meets with a number of quotations and terms derived originally from Western sources, sometimes through a secondary Japanese, German, or English translation. This article will focus on issues that arise in the translation and interpretation of that essay, in particular on the question of determining the source text, what bearing that has or should have on scholarly translation and how the study of textual issues can shed light not only on texts but also on literary and intellectual history. It offers an analysis of Lu Xun’s own interpretation of the source texts as well as conclusions reflecting on the significance of his literary career and broader mission.

In order to discuss the issue of classifying and categorizing history, this article takes the “Seventeen-Year Literature” as its subject of study. The author states that previous studies conducted on the “Seventeen-Year Literature” (1949–1966) should have been displayed on the following levels: the literary history of the Seventeen Years, the history of the Seventeen Years which was interpreted culturally in the 1980s, the literary history of the Seventeen Years produced in modern literature and the literary history of the Seventeen Years processed in Zai jiedu (A second interpretation). Therefore, the study of the “Seventeen-year Literature” has come forward in leaps and bounds and must not stagnate. Instead, it should take previous research findings and apply them retrospectively to the current structure of knowledge in the hopes of further development. Fixing the “Seventeen-Year Literature” not to a particular historical level, but to the dialogic context is an issue that scholars cannot avoid.

Zhan Kai’s 詹垲 (c. 1860–c. 1910) two novels about women’s liberation of 1907 (Zhongguo xin nühao 中国新女豪 and Nüzi quan 女子权) are compared with each other and with three slightly earlier novels that could have been influences: Nü yuhua 女狱花 of 1904, Nüwa shi 女娲石 of 1904, and Huang Xiuqiu 黄绣球 of 1905–7. An effort is made to show what he might have borrowed and what were the most original points in Zhan’s writing. One further issue is the reason he might have written two such similar novels. Finally his guidelines for readerly behavior are explored.

The ideological trend of counter-West centralism  is becoming more and more obvious in the academic circle of Chinese literary theory from the 1980s to the beginning of this century. This article regards a certain number of phenomena as surveying targets, and analyzes that this ideological trend is embodied not only in evident purposes, slogans and views, but also in the re-thinking of education history and in the work of literary material and the reestablishing of criticism history. This article holds that the combination of two kinds of opposed learning trends for study and application respectively would be helpful in breaking through the barriers of single-sided logic, emphasizing native literary tradition, participating in contemporary literature practice and defining Chinese literary theory in the 21st century.

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.

Within the few years of its first publication in 1980, Dai Houying’s most popular and controversial novel Human, Ah, Human! drew significant attention from literary scholars throughout Chinese and English world and was often interpreted by the liberal humanist discourse as the representative work of the “thaw literature” or as the plea to revive the “human.” Recently, such appropriations of the notions of “the human” have raised suspicions among some critics both from the Beijing‐based “revisiting the 1980s (重返八 十年代) group” and some Western critical scholars, who begin to reevaluate Marxist humanism in the 1980s China. This paper, however, attempts to utilize several post‐humanist critical theories that have been persistently on guard against the theoretical limits of both liberal and Marxist humanism to reinterpret this novel. Here, the novel Human, Ah! Human, is able to encompass both the contradiction and reconciliation of various kinds of “human” voices. This paper will revisit its theatrical setting where the newborn “human” figures encounter and contend with one another. Rather than the sudden emergence of a humanist hero, or a Marxist humanist hero, it is the encounter of the Machiavellian wild individual, the philistines who pursue earthly happiness, and the romantics, that offer the untrodden path to approach the historical “real.” This paper will exhibit their combinations, permutation, and rehearsal in the fictional structure.

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.

Contemporary Chinese science fiction author and journalist Han Song’s works often cross the lines dividing reality from imagination, science fiction from literary mainstream, technology from the supernatural. This article, focusing in particular on Han’s novella “The Rebirth Bricks” (Zaisheng zhuan), aims to investigate the role played by the senses in a shift from the science fictional novum to the fictional “uncanny.” Featuring technological bricks, haunted by sounds of the dead which are perceived through sight and hearing, this novella is analyzed from the standpoint of this perceptual complementarity which expresses Han Song’s “science fictional re-enchantment,” a re-use of supernatural themes of the past that allow him to express the (technological) anomalies of China’s current reality.

Written by Qiu Huadong in 2000, Confession at Noon (Zhengwu de gongci) is a novel about the life of a renowned auteur one year after his suicide. Set at the end of the twentieth century, the story highlights the social and political change of the 1990s and its impact on the spiritual condition of intellectuals. The novel also addresses the changing role of writers as they confront new challenges presented by the rapid modernization and economic progress at the turn of the century. In this paper, I illustrate the ways in which Qiu unravels the spiritual agony of intellectuals through the portrayal of a film director’s dramatic life. I focus particularly on how Qiu uses narrative devices such as intertexuality and pastiche to illuminate the spiritual crisis and changing social position of intellectuals in the 1990s, and how he inserts fictional selves in the storytelling process to rethink his role as a writer-intellectual in the new era.

Zuo Si (ca. 253–ca. 305) was a well-known poet in the Western Jin dynasty (265–316). More than half of his surviving poems are a series of eight “Poems on History” (Yongshi). There has been extensive research into the early medieval Chinese writers influenced by his “Yongshi.” However, this research can be further deepened and broadened. This article, based on previous scholarly findings, will examine the reception of these poems in three levels of literary and cultural context. The first level emphasizes the poetic practice of intertextual links between Zuo Si’s poems and other literary works. The second level highlights primary sources of literary criticism to address the evaluations of Zuo Si’s poems. The third level focuses on narrative to reveal how the educated elite employed these poems in their discourse. Investigating these three levels allows us to understand how poets, critics, and readers imitate, evaluate, and respond to these poems during the process of their reception. Furthermore, reception theory can help to uncover similarities and discrepancies in literary borrowings and assimilation (i.e. diction, imagery, and figure of speech) in the process of poetic composition and transmission.

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.

Previous research regarding the post-80s Chinese young writers might suggest that they are urgently chasing after commercial profits, but this popular viewpoint is too simplistic when facing up to the complex historical energies of their work. This article, through close reading the writings of two representative post-80s writers Han Han and Guo Jingming, historically analyzes how the post-80s Writers crowd, by virtue of the “New Concept Composition Contest” platform, have gathered in Shanghai, and points out the core of their writing. Guo Jingming identifies himself with the logic of commercial society, gets dunk of the prosperous of Shanghai, then devoices the young generation from the real Chinese status. Han Han uses the ironic method to deconstruct state propaganda and cultural symbols of Shanghai, while all his heroes or heroines are on cruising the way, do not willing to belong to any value system. The article argues that post-80s writing is ultimately a narrative about the “Chinese Dream,” and on how to rebuild relationships between individuals and their communities.

In the past ten years, with the rise and popularity of Internet technology, Chinese society has experienced a silent “cultural uprising,” which has formed a part of the lives and habits of contemporary ordinary Chinese at different levels, and has challenged the old pattern of cultural power and governance. How to identify this phenomenon, and carry out corresponding reforms, as an important aspect of national governance, is an urgent research topic. Based on the observation and analysis of the phenomenon of Chinese Internet culture in recent years, we can explore and summarize several key issues of China’s current cultural governance reform, and try to explain theoretically the influence of cultural prosperity on political power by retrospecting several governance experiences and lessons in history. In the era of the new Internet technology, how to truly enhance the nation’s basic ability to avoid the situation of dying once and letting go. The complexity of contemporary cultural governance comes from the new technological conditions, while the difficult problem runs through the historical understanding of the entire new cultural governance capacity.

Nourished by the natural scenery of the Daxing’anling Mountains when growing up, Chi Zijian has grand literary beliefs and tends to build worlds filled with divinity to bridge ideals and reality in her literary creations. Her novel At the Peak (Qunshan zhi Dian), published in 2015, creates a poetic and distant place with an air of mystery. The most prominent feature of her cogitation on divinity in the novel is the depiction of a charming world where every being has a spirit and this is reflected in the transcendental mood of the language used in the novel. Together, these features constitute the unique aesthetic characteristics of the divinity narrative in Chi’s novels. In her works, active construction and passive deconstruction appear simultaneously, and the contradiction displays her respect for and concern about reality. Nonetheless, the romantic and poetic flavor of literature arises out of the crevices of pain precisely at the point where secularity and fairy tales collide and when despair reaches toward hope. This is the charm of At the Peak.

The imagination of the social form has been an important theme in the 21st century Chinese science fictions. The imagination of a social form on the model of “Elder’s dual vector foil” contains a logical asymmetry—high-level technology and a primary social form. From the perspective of historical materialism and dialectics, this imagination and other imaginations of the social form, such as intelligent algorithms, that internally dominate or distort the social form through technology, reveal its flaws and limitations. Compared to the imagination of specific technology, the imagination of social form emphasizes the entirety and connection of multiple social factors, and it is hard to thoroughly dispense the invisible dominance of existing human experience. Marxist theory and methodology are indispensable to the imagination of social form in science fiction. Reigniting the Marxist critical imagination of future social form and activating the aesthetic power of this imagination are the future directions of the development of science fiction.

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.

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.

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.

I unveil the aristocratic ethos regarding religion in imperial China under the reign of the Qing dynasty. Adopting a literary perspective, I deploy a hermeneutic methodology by means of scrutinizing the chef-d’oeuvre of a master writer Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber, which embroiders trials and tribulations of an enormous aristocratic clan that embodies every stratum of Qing society, especially the upper strata. Through critically analyzing the novel translated by David Hawkes, I investigate the comprehensive permeation of religious ideology within the moneyed family from the aspects of credos, practices and language. I explore theodiversity and polytheism epotimised by harmonious contemporaneous of (sub-)religions, and propound that such phenomena are owing to lack of an overwhelmingly predominant religion, which can be accounted for by external and internal factors—the former pertains to centralization of authority in feudal China and orthodox Confucian thinking that promulgates atheism and agnosticism as well as ancestor and Heaven worship, while the latter entails the liberalism, i.e. non-sanctimoniousness and non-expansionism of indigenous and Sinicised religions. I also propose the overarching rationale accounting for the contemporaneous of religious theologies among the aristocracy, viz., the practicality and pragmatism of the Chinese nation.

During the pre-Qin period, shi yan zhi (poetry expressing aspirations) was not a poetic concept. It primarily served to shape Confucian ideology, carrying significant discourse implications. The practices of shi yan zhi and bi zhi in religious rituals held important implications for poem reciting, a prevalent activity during the banquet ceremonies in the Spring and Autumn Period and its various forms. Together, they established the rites and music tradition characterized by yanshuo (speeches). This tradition further established the status of The Book of Odes as a classic, furnishing high-ranking officials and Confucian scholars with legitimacy and rich discourse resources to develop new ideologies. The different interpretations and applications of shi yan zhi resulted in diverse discourse models, such as duanzhang-quyi (to interpret out of context), xin’er youzheng (being reliable and borne out by evidence), wenwang yinyan (no word, no expression of thoughts) and yiyi-nizhi (interpreting a writing from one’s perspective). Through these different interpretations and applications, the scholarly-official class established multiple values and objectives, such as liyan buxiu (advocating lasting noble ideas untouched by time), xing-guan-qun yuan (stimulation, contemplation, communication, and criticism), shang you (befriending those superior to oneself), fa hu qing, zhi hu li yi (starting with feelings and control with propriety). In the process of building a unified ideology in the Han Dynasty, the “Introduction to Mao’s Version of The Book of Odes” advocated the unity of qing (sentiment) and zhi(aspiration), infusing shi yan zhi with connotations of enlightenment as well as extolment and satirical criticism. This advocacy redefined the political authority and discourse models of the scholar-official class, objectively unveiling the literary features of poetry, such as evoking an emotional response and commencing the practice of education through poetry teaching.