This book surveys influential readings and rewritings of the Chinese literary tradition by Western writers over the past century, from Ezra Pound and Haroldo de Campos to Pearl Buck, Robert van Gullick, Pascal Quignard, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

With the 1989 Beijing massacre fading from popular memory in the West, China from the mid-1990s to a few years ago felt more open than ever to global trade, communication, travel, and cultural and educational exchanges. There was even talk in the mainstream press that China was heading toward a more democratic future. It was during this second Sino-Western honeymoon that authors in the US, Canada, France, the UK, and elsewhere began writing mystery fiction set in contemporary China in their regional languages. These “China mysteries”—crime, detective, and mystery thriller novels that take place in China but were not written or published there—formed a new genre of popular fiction that highlighted the world’s hopes and fears after Tiananmen. The multinational and multicultural writers of China mysteries, among them ex-PRC nationals like Qiu Xiaolong, Zhang Xinxin, and Diane Wei Liang, converged on the China Mainland to negotiate political and cultural complexities through crime fiction plotlines. Their books emerged from Western lineages of the modern novel and popular genre fiction—with Chinese contributions—and depended on Western commercial publishing models shaped by cultural, national, political, and economic factors. This work examines more than a hundred China mysteries—many describing and analyzing social and economic changes at the center of modern life in China—to provide a brief history of the genre and analyze the formulaic and original elements of the mysteries, including their attention to matters of location, social content, characterization, history, and biography. It also highlights the role of “information” acquisition as a motivation for readers and authors of popular fiction, which has become a topic of discussion in Chinese literature studies. With its timely commentary on Sino-Western relations as presented through crime fiction, China Mysteries will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Chinese literature and culture, as well as fans of crime novels and others who are curious about the global dimensions of the genre and how it complicates our understanding of “world literature.”

The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature features more than fifty short essays on specific writers and literary trends from the Qing period (1895–1911) to the present. The volume opens with thematic essays on the politics and ethics of writing literary history, the formation of the canon, the relationship between language and form, the role of literary institutions and communities, the effects of censorship, the representation of the Chinese diaspora, the rise and meaning of Sinophone literature, and the role of different media in the development of literature. Subsequent essays focus on authors, their works, and the schools with which they were aligned, featuring key names, titles, and terms in English and in Chinese characters. Woven throughout are pieces on late Qing fiction, popular entertainment fiction, martial arts fiction, experimental theater, post-Mao avant-garde poetry, post–martial law fiction from Taiwan, contemporary genre fiction from China, and recent Internet literature. The volume includes essays on such authors as Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, Jin Yong, Mo Yan, Wang Anyi, Gao Xingjian, and Yan Lianke. Both a teaching tool and a go-to research companion, this volume is a one-of-a-kind resource for mastering modern literature in the Chinese-speaking world.

This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”

This volume explores the complex aesthetic, cultural, and memory politics of urban representation and reconfiguration in neo-Victorian discourse and practice. Through adaptations of traditional city tropes – such as the palimpsest, the labyrinth, the femininised enigma, and the marketplace of desire – writers, filmmakers, and city planners resurrect, preserve, and rework nineteenth-century metropolises and their material traces while simultaneously Gothicising and fabricating ‘past’ urban realities to serve present-day wants, so as to maximise cities’ potential to generate consumption and profits. Within the cultural imaginary of the metropolis, this volume contends, the nineteenth century provides a prominent focalising lens that mediates our apperception of and engagement with postmodern cityscapes. From the site of capitalist romance and traumatic lieux de mémoire to theatre of postcolonial resistance and Gothic sensationalism, the neo-Victorian city proves a veritable Proteus evoking myriad creative responses but also crystallising persistent ethical dilemmas surrounding alienation, precarity, Othering, and social exclusion.

Philip F. Williams has published nine books in East Asian studies, including The Great Wall of Confinement (UCal, 2004), and has been Professor of Chinese at Massey University and Arizona State University. --

Setting the context for the upheavals and transformations of contemporary China, this text provides a re-assessment of Max Weber’s celebrated sociology of China. Returning to the sources drawn on by Weber in The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, it offers an informed account of the Chinese institutions discussed and a concise discussion of Weber’s writings on ‘the rise of modern capitalism’. Notably it subjects Weber’s argument to critical scrutiny, arguing that he drew upon sources which infused the central European imagination of the time, constructing a sense of China in Europe, whilst European writers were constructing a particular image of imperial China and its Confucian framework. Re-examining Weber’s discussion of the role of the individual in Confucian thought and the subordination, in China, of the interests of the individual to those of the political community and the ancestral clan, this book offers a cutting edge contribution to the continuing debate on Weber’s RoC in East Asia today, against the background of the rise of modern capitalism in the “little dragons” of Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, and the “big dragons” of Japan and the People’s Republic of China.