Recognized as modern China’s preeminent man of letters, Lu Xun (1881–1936) is revered as the nation’s conscience, a writer comparable to Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Gloria Davies’s vivid portrait gives readers a better sense of this influential author by situating the man Mao Zedong hailed as “the sage of modern China” in his turbulent time and place.

Literature in Times of Revolution (1927) -- Miscellaneous Thoughts (1927) -- The Divergence of Art and Politics (1928) -- Literature and Revolution: A Reply (1928) -- An Overview of the Present State of New Literature (1929) -- A Glimpse at Shanghai Literature (1931) -- On the "Third Type of Person" (1932) -- The Most Artistic Country (1933) -- The Crisis of the Small Essay (1933) -- V. On Modern Culture -- Impromptu Reflections No. 48 (1919) -- Untitled (1922) -- What Happens after Nora Walks Out (1924) -- On Photography and Related Matters (1925) -- Modern History (1933) -- Lessons from the Movies (1933) -- Shanghai Children (1933) -- How to Train Wild Animals (1933) -- Toys (1934) -- The Glory to Come (1934) -- The Decline of the Western Suit (1934) -- Take-ism (1934) -- Ah Jin (1936) -- Written Deep into the Night (1936) -- Notes -- Lu Xun's Oeuvre -- Acknowledgments -- Illustration Credits -- Index

China’s century of revolutionary change has been heard as much as seen, and nowhere is this more evident than in an auditory history of the modern Chinese poem. From Lu Xun’s seminal writings on literature to a recitation renaissance in urban centers today, poetics meets politics in the sounding voice of poetry. Supported throughout by vivid narration and accessible analysis, Voices in Revolution offers a literary history of modern China that makes the case for the importance of the auditory dimension of poetry in national, revolutionary, and postsocialist culture. Crespi brings the past to life by first examining the ideological changes to poetic voice during China’s early twentieth-century transition from empire to nation. He then traces the emergence of the spoken poem from the May Fourth period to the present, including its mobilization during the Anti-Japanese War, its incorporation into the student protest repertoire during China’s civil war, its role as a conflicted voice of Mao-era revolutionary passion, and finally its current adaptation to the cultural life of China’s party-guided market economy. Voices in Revolution alters the way we read by moving poems off the page and into the real time and space of literary activity. To all readers it offers an accessible yet conceptually fresh and often dramatic narration of China’s modern literary experience. Specialists will appreciate the book’s inclusion of noncanonical texts as well as its innovative interdisciplinary approach.

This book introduces the major works and debates in Chinese children's literature within the framework of China's revolution and modernization. It demonstrates that the guiding rationale in children's literature was the political importance of children as the nation's future.

Explains why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and shows his Machiavellian role in masterminding it. This book documents the Hobbesian state that ensued. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing - Mao's wife and leader of the Gang of Four - while Mao often played one against the other.

Two of China's greatest 20th century writers renegotiate woman's sense of self and place