Abstract
The term “modernity” was rarely used or examined in the English language study of twentieth-century Chinese literature before the year 1989. For a field defined by the “modern”, this seems ironic, but it also draws attention to the ideological nature of the manner in which Chinese modernity is conceived, particularly in the West, and also, to an extent, in China. That is to say, in part because of the influence of the May Fourth Movement, that the equation of “Westernization” with “modernization” has been taken for granted for far too long; so, virtually every discussion of modern Chinese culture up through the 1980s is circumscribed by the questions of “the introduction of things Western” and “the response to the West.” Even if this were the sum and substance of Chinese modernity, it is clearly a far different way of looking at modernity than is common in the West.
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Notes
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978).
Particularly the first one: Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Literary trends I: the quest for modernity, 1895–1927”, in Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) pp. 452–504.
Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East and West (Theory of History and Literature 75), ed. Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
For Průšek’s review, Hsia’s response, and Průšek’s rebuttal, see Jaroslav Průšek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).
Rey Chow, “The politics and pedagogy of Asian literatures in American universities”, in Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, ed. Rey Chow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 120–143.
See, e.g., the collection Wang Xiaoming, ed., Ershi Shiji Zhongguo Wenxue Shilun (Historiography of Twentieth Century Chinese Literature) (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 1997).
Some recent Chinese approaches can be seen in Pang-yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
The work of Kirk Denton, Michel Hockx, and Denise Gimpel, to name a few, is exemplary in this respect; see Kirk Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998);
Denise Gimpel, Lost Voices of Modernity: A Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001);
Michel Hockx, Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937(Leiden: Brill, 2003).
Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torgeson, ed., Writing Women in Modern China: An Anthology of Women’s Literature from the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998);
Amy D. Dooling, ed., Writing Women in Modern China, Volume II: An Anthology of Women’s Literature about War, Revolution, and Socialist Construction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
This is the approach adopted in David Der-wei Wang and Jeanne Tai, Running Wild: New Chinese Writers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). See Wang’s closing article, “Chinese Fiction for the Nineties”, pp. 238–258.
Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Kojin Karatani has suggested that romanticism and realism were two sides of the same coin in modern Japanese literature; I think the same argument could be made for the modern Chinese case.
Kojin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
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© 2005 Charles A. Laughlin
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Laughlin, C.A. (2005). Introduction. In: Laughlin, C.A. (eds) Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981332_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981332_1
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