This book examines the works of three leading writers-Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei-and their significant contributions to the genre of Chinese avant-garde fiction.

In this innovative work, Ming Dong Gu examines Chinese literature and traditional Chinese criticism to construct a distinctly Chinese theory of fiction and places it within the context of international fiction theory. He argues that because Chinese fiction, or xiaoshuo, was produced in a tradition very different from that of the West, it has formed a system of fiction theory that cannot be adequately accounted for by Western fiction theory grounded in mimesis and realism. Through an inquiry into the macrocosm of Chinese fiction, the art of formative works, and theoretical data in fiction commentaries and intellectual thought, Gu explores the conceptual and historical conditions of Chinese fiction in relation to European and world fiction. In the process, Gu critiques and challenges some accepted views of Chinese fiction and provides a theoretical basis for fresh approaches to fiction study in general and Chinese fiction in particular. Such masterpieces as the Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) and the Hongloumeng (The Story of the Stone) are discussed at length to advance his notion of fiction and fiction theory.

Liang Shi teaches Chinese language and literature at Miami University (Ohio).

Chinese Reportage details for the first time in English the creation and evolution of a distinctive literary genre in twentieth-century China. Reportage literature, while sharing traditional journalism’s commitment to the accurate, nonfictional portrayal of experience, was largely produced by authors outside the official news media. In identifying the literary merit of this genre and establishing its significance in China’s leftist cultural legacy, Charles A. Laughlin reveals important biases that impede Western understanding of China and, at the same time, supplies an essential chapter in Chinese cultural history. Laughlin traces the roots of reportage (or baogao wenxue) to the travel literature of the Qing Dynasty but shows that its flourishing was part of the growth of Chinese communism in the twentieth century. In a modern Asian context critical of capitalism and imperialism, reportage offered the promise of radicalizing writers through a new method of literary practice and the hope that this kind of writing could in turn contribute to social revolution and China’s national self-realization. Chinese Reportage explores the wide range of social engagement depicted in this literature: witnessing historic events unfolding on city streets; experiencing brutal working conditions in 1930s Shanghai factories; struggling in the battlefields and trenches of the war of resistance against Japan, the civil war, and the Korean war; and participating in revolutionary rural, social, and economic transformation. Laughlin’s close readings emphasize the literary construction of social space over that of character and narrative structure, a method that brings out the critique of individualism and humanism underlying the genre’s aesthetics. Chinese Reportage recaptures a critical aspect of leftist culture in China with far-reaching implications for historians and sociologists as well as literary scholars.

The Fragile Scholar examines the pre-modern construction of Chinese masculinity from the popular image of the fragile scholar (caizi) in late imperial Chinese fiction and drama. The book is an original contribution to the study of the construction of masculinity in the Chinese context from a comparative perspective (Euro-American). Its central thesis is that the concept of "masculinity" in pre-modern China was conceived in the network of hierarchical social and political power in a homosocial context rather than in opposition to "woman." In other words, gender discourse was more power-based than sex-based in pre-modern China, and Chinese masculinity was androgynous in nature. The author explains how the caizi discourse embodied the mediation between elite culture and popular culture by giving voice to the desire, fantasy, wants and tastes of urbanites.

In the traditional Chinese symbolic vocabulary, the construction of gender was never far from debates about ritual propriety, desire, and even cosmic harmony. Competing Discourses maps the aesthetic and semantic meanings associated with gender in the Ming-Qing vernacular novel through close readings of five long narratives: Marriage Bonds to Awaken the World, Dream of the Red Chamber, A Country Codger's Words of Exposure, Flowers in the Mirror, and A Tale of Heroic Lovers. Epstein argues that the authors of these novels manipulated gendered terms to achieve structural coherence. These patterns are, however, frequently at odds with other gendered structures in the texts, and authors exploited these conflicts to discuss the problem of orthodox behavior versus the cult of feeling.