This paper offers a new interpretation of Zhao Shuli’s (1906–70) stories by examining how his efforts were coinciding, or sometimes perhaps in conflict, with the Communist Party of China’s mandate of creating a “new direction” for society. The discussions of his stories reveal the general historical experience of a rural society in transition in the “liberated area.” There are two major themes: social improvement under the intervention of the new government, and the “standing up” of the subaltern peasant class. These motifs often overlap to various degrees, and sometimes there is a hybrid narrative which combines the two. The last section of this paper briefly explores the supposed paradox of Zhao Shuli’s “direction,” its contributions to representing and educating the masses, and its limitations in fulfilling the party’s long-term ideological goal of reforming the peasants’ ethical-moral world.

This article examines Liu Qing’s 1959 novel The Builders, an epical work on the Agricultural Cooperation Movement, from the perspective of configuration of the Socialist New Man. Illuminated by the works of the May Fourth generation, especially Lu Xun, the author argues that the figure of the Socialist New Man usually differentiates itself into two literary prototypes—meditator and doer. Liu Qing attempts to maintain a productive and dialectic tension between meditations and deeds, instead of mere discrepancy or incompatibility. The article demonstrates that in literature, while the meditator can be depicted thoroughly through psychological dynamics and unconscious dreams, it is more problematic to represent the doer. Such a formal and philosophical problem is central to literature, as well as corresponds to the socio-historical paradox of the 1950s China.

Commonly acclaimed for its black humor, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out uses the Buddhist concept of reincarnation to follow two families during the second half of the 20th century. The novel exemplifies the strategies through which Mo Yan transforms the violent and absurd events of recent Chinese history into personal memory of historical trauma. It focuses less, however, on those events per se than on the traumatic effects they create on the individual victims, and on the ways through which personal trauma caused by historical atrocities is addressed and healed. This article analyzes three layers of the novel: the evolving mechanisms of violence that condition the formation of personal trauma; the theatrical manifestation of the state-endorsed violence, and its loss in the post-revolutionary era; and the rationalization of the tragicomic past through the dialectic of remembering and forgetting. Built one on the other, these layers constitute the very dynamic stage on which the individuals interact with the violent and absurd world to negotiate the meaning of their lives, make sense of historical trauma, and insist on driving historical change.

Qianzi wen exerted great influence in Japan. Nowadays, experts find it necessary to further study the numerous and diverse sequels of Qianzi wen, because no systematic research had actually been made on them. This article, focusing on the spread of Qianzi wen in Korean Peninsula and Japan, is intended to discuss its influence on East Asian literature, especially on Sinological literature.

Though Lu Yao's Ordinary World (Pingfan de Shijie) has enjoyed considerable sales volume and reading quantity similar to his other novel Life (Rensheng), it is not accepted by the literary circle as Life and failed to spark the kind of nationwide discussion once created by Life. One explanation for this is the sweeping desire for innovation that was present in literary circles in the 1980s, but the creation method of the Ordinary World was too conservative to stimulate the interpretive impulse of the new critics; another reason is that the incredible length and sheer complexity of Ordinary World prevented scholars from recognizing how difficult it was conceived and what innovation it made. This paper embarks on an intensive reading of Ordinary World in terms of its characterization, the character groups of urban and rural youths, senior cadres, and rural grassroots cadres, and a re-elucidation of its "overlapping areas," in an attempt to extensively analyze the content of the panoramic chronicle of Chinese society at the beginning of reform and opening up, and the writer's profound thinking and artistic innovation in his description, trying to clarify the many vague understandings of this masterpiece in the literary circle.

Chi Zijian's novel The Last Quarter of the Moon (E'erguna He You'an) is an excellent historical novel themed around the life of the Evenki people. It depicts the important theme of “looking back at home” and reveals a yearning for “poetic dwelling” shared by many contemporary people who feel lost. The novel’s unique perspective explores the “origin” of home and shows the close relationship between the lives of the Evenki people, the landscape, and their fate on the right bank of the Argun River. The unique grounds on which the novel stands can be found in its inquiry into the “uniqueness” of home, vividly describing the Evenki people’s special living “place” and their unique approaches to birth, death, marriage, and funeral. In this recollection, the novel shows us the unique ecological beauty of Evenki homeland, including the feminine beauty of harmonious well-being found between people and nature, as well as the masculine beauty of the struggle that exists between humans and nature, which are both reflected in the “ecological sublimity” of the primitive religious ceremonies carried out by two generations of shamans for tribal benefits.

The Lyric Collection on Objects of the Tea Smoke Pavilion is an anthology that Zhu Yizun compiled in his later years by carefully selecting object-depicting lyrics he composed throughout his life. Approximately 70 percent of the works were created before he participated in the imperial examination in 1679. This indicates that this anthology does not fully reflect the characteristics of the lyrics he penned in his later years. The collection title “Tea Smoke Pavilion,” as revealed in The Lyric Collection of the Serenity Dwelling, reflects the poet’s distinctive approach to expressing emotions through depicting objects. A detailed examination of Zhu’s works from the perspectives of textual structure, language, tone pattern and rhyming demonstrates that Zhu has consistently adhered to the same guiding principle when composing object-depicting lyrics. He has elevated the technique of “objectification,” pioneered by the poets of the Southern Song Dynasty to a new realm, crafting a unique beauty in object-depicting lyrics, which is different from the beauty of Song lyrics. His success is rooted in his emotional experiences depicted in The Serenity Dwelling Collection. His relentless exploration in artistic forms has provided a source of inspiration for scholars of later generations to explore how to convey personal sentiments. It also offers an opportunity to reflect on the merits and demerits regarding the development of object-depicting lyrics during the Qing Dynasty.

In both Lu Xun’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (1924) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948), a woman is made a sacrificial victim by her village community, one symbolically and one literally. Using the two stories as my cross-cultural examples, I ponder the connection between the failure of sympathy and patriarchal sacrificial logic, and ask what literature can do to help create the condition of possibility for moral agency.

Russian writer Nicholas Ostrovski’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934) provided generations of Chinese youth with a widely admired role model: a young devoted communist soldier, Pawel Korchagin, whose image occupied a prominent place in the orthodoxy revolutionary education and literary imagination during Mao’s era. Over the past decade, Pawel Korchagin has regained his popularity in Chinese media, his name and image have been appropriated by numerous artists and filmmakers to help in portrayals of the new generation’s self-fashioning. The various (unorthodox) interpretations recently attached to Pawel’s heroic story reveal a huge gap between Maoist ideology and the post-Mao ideas. This paper looks into the intricate relationships between Pawel Korchagin’s revolutionary past and his varied contemporary representations. By doing so, I hope to gain a better understanding of the cultural politics of appropriating Mao’s legacy to create new meanings for a changing Chinese society. One example on which this paper focuses is the sixth-generation director Lu Xuechang’s film Becoming a Man (1997), which rewrites the revolutionary Bildungsroman of Pawel in a startling different context.

The purpose of the paper is to draw the historical background of the New Man in Socialism from his beginning in the 1917 avant-garde circles after the October Revolution in Russia—specially in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s technique of typage—to its oversimplification as official aesthetic during the Stalin’s period and its adoption by the People’s Republic of China and the motivation behind it. The iconic and extremely codified images of the Socialist New Man are analyzed under the new light of the recent essays about art, which defy the traditional image among scholars of the style as monolithic and lackluster. The later part of the paper deals with the fading away of Socialist Realism during the 1980s as the Soviet bloc disintegrated and China evolved into a “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics,” but persisted, applied adamantly, in North Korea, who exports it to African countries like Senegal or Namibia.

“Family” as Ba Jin’s intense concern seems to be a central icon of his literary works, carrying through from his Family (1933) to Cold Nights (1947). After briefly reassessing Ba Jin’s literary contribution in his early phase, this essay will focus more on Ba Jin’s novels written in the 1940s, particularly his Ward Four, which rarely attracts critical attention. For Lu Xun, mental disease in China was more crucial than physical disease. Ba Jin uses both mental and physical diseases to explore humanity in a wartime hospital. Ba Jin’s early novels were infused with more radical ideas, but as a more mature writer in the 1940s he provided readers with a new perspective to explore and understand society.

Through a formal analysis of this seminar work of Lu Xun, the author observes that the narrative and dramatic motivation of Ah Q—The Real Story is an intense yet futile search for a proper name and identity within a system of naming and identity-formation as the system, by default, repels the identity-seeking and “homecoming” effort of the sign in question (“Ah Q”). Based on this observation, the author goes on to argue that the origin of Chinese modernism lies in a highly political awareness of one’s loss of cultural belonging and thus one’s collective alienation from the matrix of tradition and indeed existence. Departing from conventional reading of this work, often anchored in sociopolitical interpretations of class, nation, and group psychology centered on the “critique of national characteristics” discourse, this article maintains that the true ambition and literary energy of Lu Xun’s masterpiece can only be fully grasped when one confronts this epic cultural-political struggle to regain a cultural system’s power and legitimation to name one’s own existence and define one’s own value.

For a long time, the legitimacy of Chinese traditional poetry and lyrics has been suspected, denied or suspended. Therefore, it was deserted by literature studies and literature history writing. Accordingly, it caused a man-made barrier to this part of literature resources. Some researchers have doubted and denied the legitimacy of traditional poetry and lyrics and some paid no attention to the fate and form of the traditional literary style. Academic researchers should change their prejudice to the traditional poetry and lyrics. First of all, we should understand the rationality of the traditional poetry and lyrics. It is also necessary to redefine the category of modern literature and use modern Chinese poetry to cover all the poetry in the 20th century and put an end to the conflicts between new poetry and traditional poetry. The traditional poetry in the 20th century has demonstrated the pursuit of modernity and self-sufficiently become a new historical tradition. Besides, in the new era, we should also broke the binary opposition between new poetry and traditional poetry and take traditional poetry as the cultural achievements of Chinese people in the new historical period, which will greatly facilitate the development of traditional poetry and enhance our understanding of literature and culture.

This paper examines different modes of representation of the courtesan in the poetry, painting and anecdotes of the Tang dynasty, and the implications of the disparities between these genres. Examples of courtesan poems idolized these entertaining girls and featured a poetic approach that drew on early romantic depictions of goddesses. The courtesan was presented as an immortal woman, given a transcendental dimension. These elements were echoed and reinforced in visual depictions in grotto or mausoleum murals. Stories from the Beili zhi (Records of the northern quarter), a collection of anecdotes about courtesans in Chang’an by a contemporary Tang scholar, show a different set of criteria for immortality. The author held up to his readers a more realistic and faithful mirror of the courtesan’s manners and life.

A new trend has emerged in Chinese film over the past two decades in which the story of the working class has been narrated aimed at an authentic representation of the nation’s socialist past, against the general demonization of the Maoist era. Still, there are a number of problems existed in this cinematic “new wave.” This paper analyzes a recent example of this tide, The Road (Fangxiang zhi lü, 2006), and its implications. A careful examination of the film’s narrative strategy reveals that it is oftentimes entrenched in the bourgeois ideology of “human nature,” which circumscribes its intended agenda of making a genuine reflection on the past and present of Chinese workers. On the surface, this film offers a positive image of the Maoist period by presenting a vivacious revolutionary work ethic in the female protagonist and her master. However, on a deeper level, the film only gives an impression of pity for this wretched workwoman who has completely wasted her life. Her “human nature” has been distorted by her socialist work ethic that had been inscribed with imprints of Maoism. In the mean time, the movie’s repetition of political clichés against revolutionary discourse, and an artificial binarity between socialism and commercial culture, bring out the real effect that rather than departing from stereotypes, it in effect merely perpetuates the popular narrative that has come to stigmatize the Maoist era. By this strategy, the film also evades the responsibility of accounting for the real reason for the gigantic social-political transformation.

When late Qing and early Republican-period Chinese reformers grappled with the challenges of creating a new poetic language and form in the early decades of the twentieth century, Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), one of modern China’s most influential intellectuals, believed that much could be learned from the experiments of modern Japanese poets who had overcome similar challenges in the decades following the Meiji restoration. Of all the verse forms Japanese poets were experimenting with, Zhou was particularly interested in modern haiku and tanka. Zhou felt that the modern haiku and tanka’s rootedness in tradition on the one hand and their ability to express modern sensibilities on the other could offer a model for Chinese poets seeking to create a poetic voice that was at once modern, but also anchored in traditional poetics. This article will analyze some of Zhou’s translations of modern haiku and tanka and illustrate how these translations led him to promote a new poetic form in China, typically referred to as “short verse” (xiaoshi). By further reading Zhou’s critical essays on modern Japanese poetry against the writings of a number of Western modernist poets and translators who themselves were inspired by East Asian verse forms—Ezra Pound in particular—I will comment on the degree to which Zhou’s promotion of short verse inspired by modern Japanese haiku and tanka challenges a perceived Western role in legitimizing East Asian forms as conducive to modernism.

This article is about the movies from Chinese mainland under the production category of minority cinema (shaoshu minzu dianying), between the years 1940 and 1963. It argues that the taxonomic effort of grouping different non-Han ethnicities together into a single category of minority cinema is a sociopolitical attempt to construct, maintain and control the definition of ethnic minorities. It calls into question not what is within the film, but the classificatory practices outside of the film collectively engaged by the government, the film industry, the critics and the mass audience. Moving away from the methods of examining the representation and generic conventions of the cinema other scholarship has employed, this article emphasizes the classification system used during the time of the cinema. By comparing it with a similar classificatory problem in Western national history, using an epistemological perspective, this article criticizes the negative impact inevitably left in rhetorically driven classification systems.

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.

Scholars have attempted to find a common pattern of thought to summarize Takeuchi Yoshimi’s arguments on the relationship between subject and knowledge, literature and politics, and event and history, regardless of their diversity, under several key words. These attempts highlight Takeuchi’s primary concerns. However, existing studies of Takeuchi rarely point out his idiosyncratic understanding of the “eschatological,” which is both esthetic and horizon-determining because Takeuchi invariably tends to refer to “eschatology” despite his efforts to avoid theorizing it systematically. Considering that the literature on Takeuchi hardly does justice to this aspect of his writing, the present article intends to emphasize it. The article argues that “eschatology” emphasizes the element of contingency in the existential process of things, as well as its transformations, developments, and disappearance. Furthermore, this article focuses on the unpresentable nature of things in a state of so-called “nothingness.”

Chi Zijian’s literary narrative of northeast China over a century essentially embodies a serious and concrete historical record of the Chinese nation. It also makes efforts to explore the profoundness and vitality of history, the presence of northeast China, and the culture and spiritual philosophy of the region. Undoubtedly, such narrative is self-perpetuating, just as is the historical process of northeast China. Puppet Manchukuo (Wei Manzhouguo), The Last Quarter of the Moon (E’erguna He You’an), and White Snow and Crow (Baixue Wuya) written by Chi Zijian are all important contemporary literary works worth “rereading” time and again.

This paper aims to interpret Liang Xiaosheng’s novel A Lifelong Journey. It argues that the novel reproduces life from the 1970s till now. The people from various social strata including workers, urban civilians, intellectuals, and officials who are nurtured on the soil of civilians constitute the current Chinese society. Liang Xiaosheng takes workers back to the center of social analysis by portraying the life and spirits of the working class. With “good people” as the keynote in characterization, Liang Xiaosheng, in the debate about goodness, reaffirms the value of goodness in the novel which shines with the radiance of idealism. The narration of epic nature evokes people’s memory of the socialist era, and also presents a historical picture of the world.

The composition of group poems based on evocation with miscellaneous themes (za-xing) first emerged in the Tang Dynasty, pioneered by Du Fu and Chu Guangxi, but an extraordinary outburst of group poems based on evocation with miscellaneous themes emerged in the the resurgence era of Southern Song Dynasty. This phenomenon was not only influenced by new ideas in poetics and the studies of Confucian classics in the Southern Song Dynasty but also directly stemmed from the resistance against the poetic system represented by the Jiangxi poetry school. The group poems based on evocation with miscellaneous themes of poets such as Lu You, Yang Wanli, and Fan Chengda exhibit a tendency opposite to the Jiangxi poetic style in terms of their overall characteristics. The rise of evocation with miscellaneous themes poems in the poetic circle of the the resurgence era of Southern Song Dynasty holds significant importance in the history of Song poetry. It represents a rebellious and rule-breaking force that fundamentally protests against the various rules and boundaries established by Song poetics, marking a revolution in the norms of Song poetry.

I came to know the works of Ouyang Qiansen for the first time through the TV series Madame Shexiang (Shexiang Furen) and Unbreakable Pass (Xiongguan Mandao), and his screenwriting skills immediately struck me. Later, I read many of his full-length and medium-length novels as well as his short stories. The short stories of his works certainly display the most devotion and exemplify his highest achievement. There is no doubt that the short story is a very difficult literary form. As Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Wang Zengqi, Sun Li, Su Tong and many other great writers have made remarkable artistic achievements, the art of the short story has been pushed to the extreme, thus making it even more challenging to achieve success in the genre. Ouyang Qiansen, however, has done it by immersing himself in the art of the short story. This paper explores the artistic achievements within Ouyang Qiansen’s short stories, providing some reference for enriching the artistic landscape of the short story.

The Maihe River, a novel by Guan Renshan, can be regarded as a summarizing work of transcendence of the writer’s neo-realism style, showcasing his pursuit and formulation of the “new rural epic” aesthetic, which has major significance for both the writer’s creative process and contemporary Chinese realism writing. In this novel, Guan Renshan not only epically portrays the changing relationship between farmers and their land by using poetic sentiment and rational philosophical thought, but also probes deeply into these new rural areas, new villages, and new farmers developed under the impact of modernity, demonstrating his keen insight and thought.