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.

In this paper I will re-contextualize Lu Xun’s early thought, as evidenced in his lengthy classical-style essays, which are concerned with issues in literature, philosophy, politics and aesthetics during an era when China was facing profound cultural changes. Part of their significance lies in the way they provide us with an unabashed glimpse at what Lu Xun set out to accomplish, early on, in his new-found literary career. Although they are mainly the product of his final Lehrjahre (years of study) in Japan, the fact that he chose to include the two longest of them in the very first pages of his important 1926 anthology Fen (The grave) indicates that he considered the views expressed therein neither too immature nor too passé to reprint at the height of his career as a creative writer. In fact, he wrote that one of his reasons for doing so was that a number of the literary figures and issues treated in these essays had, ironically, taken on an increased relevance for China “since the founding of the Republic.” The central concern of all the essays turns on questions of cultural crisis and transition. What I propose to do in this paper is to re-examine the essays within the context in which they first appeared, i.e., the expatriate Chinese journal Henan, then published in Tokyo as an unofficial organ of the anti-Manchu Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance).

Mo Yan’s historical novel Sandalwood Death revisits the Boxer Uprising, exploring a local structure of feeling from the point of view of oral transmissions that, one hundred years after the events, appears gradually to be receding into oblivion. It is a project of recuperation or, rather, aesthetic reconstruction of local knowledge. The staging of a variety of local performances, such as Maoqiang opera, seasonal festivals, military and religious parades, as well as of scenes of excessive violence in executions and battle scenes, appears to be a strategy for the cultural reclamation of these local experiences. The story challenges the ingrained dualism between foreign, modern imperialist and nationalist forms of rationality, and pre-modern, local patterns of behaviour and thought. Employing polyphony and multivalent historical representtations, the novel aspires to portray the social dynamics in a given geohistorical circumstances by measuring the spatiotemporal as well as the cognitive distance between the witnessed event, the testifying witness and the future receivers of the transmitted stories. Thus, the inquiry does not focus on the historical events as facts, but rather on their cultural afterlife in (founding) narratives. In times of a growing gap between the modernist vision of human liberation and the actual conditions of growing inequality, delegitimization and dispossession, this tale of unrest in the wake of globalization has as much to say about the world’s peoples around the year 2000, when the novel was published, as about the microcosm of Shandong Gaomi County around the year 1900, when the historical events took place. Taking into account that the novel was written as a local Maoqiang opera in the making and that theatres are major providers of cultural space for the enactment of the human self as the subject of history, Sandalwood Death can perhaps best be described as a theatre of reclamation.

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.

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.

Jian bureaucrats as a group played an active role in the cultural and political life of China during the mid-Tang period (CE 766–835). Mid-Tang scholars engaged in literary pursuits formed strong attachments to jian positions and were eager to serve as jian bureaucrats. If experience had taught the mid-Tang jian bureaucrats anything, it was that they had to follow cautious strategies in making arguments or suggestions concerning government affairs. This paper aims to show that these jian bureaucrats tended to incorporate their political agenda for administrative supervision into literary writings. In this sense, the relevance between literary activities having political significance and the political agenda of the mid-Tang literati holding jian positions can be examined.

This article examines the literary imaginations of the White Pagoda and demonstrates a shift in its representation from a metaphor for the Song court’s fate to a fantastic site for the subjugation of unworldly beings. In the late thirteenth century, the Yuan-appointed Tibetan Buddhist monk Yang Lianzhenjia exhumed the imperial mausoleums of the defeated Southern Song, built the White Pagoda on the site of the old Southern Song palace in Hangzhou, and interred the exhumed bones under it. Enthusiastic Song loyalists thus considered the White Pagoda to be a symbol of a humiliating past in which the Mongol Yuan dynasty occupied the south. Meanwhile, Qu You, an early-Ming writer from Hangzhou, began to imagine that the White Pagoda served to pacify the innocent, lonely dead who died during the Song-Yuan social disturbance. Investigating the discourse of the early Ming literati in regard to the pagoda site and the supernatural in early Ming Hangzhou leads to the conclusion that the literary imagination of the White Pagoda would have also contributed to the development of the White Snake Legend, where a white serpent spirit was subdued under Thunder Peak Pagoda in Hangzhou.

Mu Shiying’s first short story collection, North Pole, South Pole (Nanbeiji) from 1932, is usually seen as socialist or proletarian literature preceding his later modernist writings. I argue that this view needs to be revised. In one short story Mu deliberately parodies the social agenda of contemporary leftist writers. The protagonists are neither enlightened workers nor victims of social injustice. On the contrary, they turn to rage, misogyny, and self-righteous violence, and their motives are rooted in their sexual frustrations and inability to cope with modern life. Their righteous ideals are based on fiction and an imagined tradition. Mu’s construction of the fictive tradition plays an important part in these early short stories, and, in this respect, I compare them with Shi Zhecun’s writings.

As we enter 21st century, with China’s economic rise, Chinese intellectual circle have come up with some new narratives regarding China’s position in the world order. Among these narratives, one that attracts most attention is the “civilization narrative.” It holds that China is not a general “nation-state,” nor a traditional “empire,” but a political body that should be described in terms of “civilization.” This article, by combining together intellectual history and social history, tries to make a critical evaluation of this “civilization narrative” from four aspects: first, the narratives about “civilization-state”; second, the relation between “civilization” and “China”; third, the contemporaneity of “civilization,” i.e. the historical condition under which classical canons and tradition are reconstituted in contemporary China; fourth, to examine the genealogy of “civilization narratives” and conceive the possibility for imagining a pluralistic world.

The aim of this essay is to point out the characteristic traits of the new Chinese literature as a “specific interliterary community” to some extent different from most of the “specific interliterary communities” of the world, for instance, Czech and Slovak literature, the Slavic literatures of Eastern Europe, or the literatures of the former socialist countries. Different from these and other communities of this kind, the new Chinese literature, especially after 1949, did not proceed with the interliterary process without points of friction, sometimes even with mutual attacks and mutual disrespect caused by political reasons: ideological differences, contradictory aims, neglect of human rights, democratic tendencies, and political propaganda. The interliterary process along which the new Chinese literature, or better to say “literatures,” is progressing, is here stressed together with “interliterariness,” the overstepping of one single literature and its coming into contact with one or more single literatures of the world. The interliterary community of Chinese literature within the whole set of its single literatures (from the mainland of China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and overseas Chinese literatures) presents an area where three different functions play their roles, of which at least one should be implemented: integrational, differentiating, and complementary. To understand the new Chinese literature in its relations within itself and the literatures of the world is a task to be fulfilled in the coming decades.

This article analyzes two literary works by the Czech writer, Julius Zeyer (1841-1901), and Lu Xun (1881-1936) by elaborating upon two different myths concerning the Archer Hou Yi. These myths were presented by the missionary and Sinologist William Frederick Mayers in The Chinese Reader’s Manual: A Handbook of Biographical, Historical, Mythological and General Literary References (1874), and other Chinese sources. Zeyer highlighted the first myth, which was connected with the Emperor Yao and showed Hou Yi shooting arrows at the nine suns appearing together in the heavens, and Lu Xun preferred the second myth, where the Archer Yi rebelled against the Emperor Tai Kang, whom he drove from the Capital, and later was killed by Han Zhuo. The myth of Chang E who flew to the moon is described only by Lu Xun.

A revival of ci writing was witnessed in the Qing dynasty. Emerging with this resurgence was the founding of scores of ci societies. After the fall of the Qing, some loyalists and traditional literati, following the examples of their predecessors, joined together to form a number of ci societies in Republican China. For loyalist-lyricists such as Zhu Zumou, ci writing was not just one of the effective ways to convey their memories of the past. It also meant to be a gesture of practicing and preserving traditional Chinese culture. However, due to ideological bias, their works and the vitality of cishe did not receive sufficient attention from literary historians in the past. This paper attempts to reveal and examine the interesting features of cishe in the Republican era, asserting that within the collective voice of and harmonious correspondence among the traditional lyricists, there were always some dissonances occurred. First I delineate a general picture of ci societies in Republican China, explicating the geographical distribution and social networks of ci lyricists and why lyricists from the Qing loyalist faction can associate with members of the anti-Manchu Southern Society (Nanshe), and what this phenomenon means to us. Then I focus on the Foam Society (Oushe), the ci society formed in Shanghai before the Japanese occupation of the city, and its group ci composition. Besides recounting Oushe members’ backgrounds and the details of their “refined gatherings,” I will bring into light the multifaceted thematic and stylistic features displayed in the members’ works.

The rhapsodies on the mind (xin-fu) is a major category of the rhapsody (fu) genre during the Wei and Jin dynasties. Those describing human sentimental psychology are known as the rhapsodies on thoughts (gan-fu). The rhapsodies on thoughts from this period embody a special proposition on how human aesthetic experience arises, which is termed as evocation (gan-xing). Evocation involves two dimensions: responding to objects (gan-wu) and responding to seasons (gan-shi). Together, they form the basic framework or mechanism that generates the abstract aesthetic experience in the rhapsodies on thoughts. More specifically, the rhapsodies on thoughts reveal five types of aesthetic experience generated: (1) aesthetic emotions triggered by natural sights; (2) philosophical insights triggered by natural sights; (3) aesthetic emotions triggered by social environments; (4) aesthetic experience triggered by natural sights and social environments; and (5) anti-evocation experience, namely an aesthetic response to the natural world triggered by specific scenes in life. These five evocation models broadly cover the aesthetic experience generated by the rhapsodies on thoughts from this period. First and foremost, evocation reveals the internal mechanism that generates aesthetic experience—external things evoke one’s inner feelings, thus creating aesthetic appreciation. Furthermore, it uncovers the normative significance of natural aesthetic appreciation as the prerequisite for artistic aesthetic appreciation: People are first moved by external objects in the realm of natural aesthetic appreciation before consciously developing the urge to express their emotions or feelings through natural images in the realm of artistic aesthetics. The rise of evocation, originating from the rhapsodies on thoughts of the Wei and Jin dynasties, signifies that Chinese aesthetic consciousness was attained during this period in relation to the mechanism of generating aesthetic experiences.

There are some drawbacks in evaluating literature purely in terms of its development and its historical setting, and the remedies may lie in cultural geography. The author argues in this paper that with the development of contemporary Chinese poetry, regional culture and aesthetics in poetry have also gradually developed. Contemporary poetry in recent years exhibits different regional ideologies. The cultural attitudes and poetry sensibility in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and the southwest areas are completely different from each other. These differences in regional aesthetics enable a diversified development of contemporary Chinese poetry.

Suzhou River, a 2000 film directed by Lou Ye, explores several tragic love stories set in Shanghai around the transitional period of 1980s and 1990s. Many critics have praised its technical excellence, yet generally they have not paid sufficient attention to its subject matter. This paper departs from previous interpretations of the film, which have tended to be premised on superficial readings of the plotline, and contends that the work constitutes a poignant socio-political critique, which is conveyed through the construction of differing love stories set against a changing socio-cultural landscape. The past and the present incarnations of the cardinal female protagonist—who can be understood as a symbol for the average Chinese (woman)—suggest the fact that the society has transformed dramatically across the three disparate eras of the past half a century; accordingly, the identity of the Chinese also shifts tremendously. In this way, Lou Ye in effect constructs a diachronic re-presentation of the changing social mores and varied cultural ethos in a synchronic structure, which is subject to be read as an ingenious historical allegory.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

After the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), leading late Qing intellectuals such as Liang Qichao introduced modern political concepts in a highly affective fashion, making the passionate interest in and adoption of western-imported political concepts a hallmark of Chinese modernity. What are these highly personalized affective experiences like? What have given rise to them? How can the study of these experiences broaden our understanding of modernity, and myriad modernizing experiences, in China and other similar cultural contexts? More importantly, how can the use of affect and emotion as analytical categories offer us better insights into some of the most radical intellectual and political transformations that have taken place in China? To answer these questions, perhaps we need to look elsewhere than the semantic content of language. This article focuses on the incipient moments of this affective trend in late Qing China and studies the formation of discursive “text” as the production of sensational “object.” It examines musical and visual appeals Liang Qichao generated for two recently translated political concepts, “national citizen” (guomin) and “revolution” (geming), in historical biographies published in New Citizen Journal in 1902. By exemplifying that Liang’s semantic text was intended to be circulated as an audio text and pictorial text, and that modern concepts had been received as literary as well as auditory and visual experiences, I argue that Chinese modernity often teeters in a state of aesthetic ambivalence. It is displaced and suspended from discursive meanings of the constructed discourse resulting from cross cultural exchanges and consolidated by power relations on both the local and the international levels.

The Diary of A Madman (Kuangren riji), Lu Xun’s first well-known short story and the alleged first modern short story in vernacular Chinese, is famous for its first-person narrative by an intellectual that is suffering from a persecution complex. As acknowledged by Lu Xun himself and argued by most scholars, this short story was influenced by Gogol’s homonymic short story, but has developed more profound melancholy and indignation. However, as my paper demonstrates, this perspective neglects the role of Japan as an intermediary in the transculturation of madness. First, Lu Xun’s initial encounter with Gogol’s Diary of A Madman was through his reading of Futabatei Shimei’s translation in the Japanese magazine Kyōmi. Second, the framed narrative and contrasting styles of Lu Xun’s short story, which are not features of Gogol’s, might also be due to the inspiration from the Japanese genbun itchi movement in the Meiji period. Third, and most importantly, cannibalism, a major theme in Lu Xun’s Diary of A Madman, was arguably shaped by the heated discussion in Japan on national character and cannibalism. My paper will trace the double origin of the depiction of madness and cannibalism in Lu Xun’s work and illustrate the importance of the role of Japan in the transculturation of the story of a madman.

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.

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.

Baoshui Village, a full-length novel by Qiao Ye, presents to its readers an open, sensitive, holistic, and reflective experiential texture thanks to the writer’s years of preparation spent “going into” and “immersing herself in villages,” as well as her rural narrative focusing on the complexity, contemporaneity, and problem of rural revitalization. The novel employs dual-narrative technique of recounting emotional and village history to advance its plot, paints pictures of village life with polyphonous scenes of village gossip, and engages in participatory observation through the use of the narrator to construct an open subject consciousness that discovers blind spots, surprises, disparities, and paradoxes in the rural experience. By selectively reconstructing the experiences of three archetypal villages and creating the new literary image of a “rural construction expert,” the novel conveys a realistic attitude that values the subjectivity and endogenous power of the countryside. In doing so, this method takes the structure of reality as its core and calls for a pragmatic standpoint that suspends any judgment, so as to “read” the Chinese countryside through the texture of reality.

This paper takes the folk song collection movement in Yan’an as an example to examine the role of the wengongtuan (The League of Literary and Artistic Workers) in organizing the rural literary popularization movement in the 1940s. Dispatched by the Communist Party of China (CPC), wengongtuan members took on the task of mobilizing peasants into cultural production, and realized a self-reconstruction in the process of integrating themselves into the lives of revolutionary peasants. The idea of the wengongtuan derived from the CPC’s theory of the mass line—“from the masses and to the masses”—which laid the foundation of New Democratic culture in the 1940s.

Lu Xun is arguably the most prolific user of pseudonyms of all writers in the world. The question, then, is why. While the diversity and multiplicity of Lu Xun’s pseudonyms defy clear classification, a close examination reveals much more than just the erstwhile political justifications for anonymity. This article argues that Lu Xun’s pseudonyms, with their rich literary allusions, satire, and humour, shed light on his complex character, and contributed to his sophisticated writing style. Through the author’s choice of pseudonyms, we see the inner workings of his mind, hear a voice of a national conscience, and feel his intense—albeit at times ambivalent—emotions. The pen-names Lu Xun ingeniously employed constructed his image as a solitary thinker and fighter embarked on a long and difficult journey in search of light in the darkness. Indeed, not only have the pseudonyms enriched the layered significance of his writing, they also have much to tell about Lu Xun both as an author and a person: his keen awareness of social and political issues, his deep insight into the weakness of the national character, and his passionate concern for the nation, as well as his eclectic approach to both classical discourse and modern narrative. And as such, these pseudonyms should form an integral part of the many queries posed and pondered by Lu Xun studies.