A certain dispute that arose during the early Jin dynasty regarding Bai Juyi that seemed to be a coincidental occurrence was to some extent inevitable. On one hand, it foreshadowed the opposition that would later arise between followers of the Tang and Song stylistic schools; on the other, it represented both the Tang school poets’ disdain for the “ornamental avant-garde” poetry that was fashionable at the time as well as their own search for a new creative direction. The re-evaluation of Bai Juyi that occurred during that period, particularly the frequent comparison of Bai to Tao Yuanming, indicates that Bai Juyi’s poetry was widely accepted at the time, which itself represented not only a challenge to traditional perspectives, but also a historical landmark in Bai Juyi’s history of acceptance. Jin dynasty poets’ creative imitation of Bai Juyi’s carefree as well as his satirical poems spurred a maturation of Bai’s spirit of concern for self and reality, which later incorporated itself into the spirit of Chinese literati in general.
In the 1920s, the Japanese scholar Naito Konan put forward the famous theories of “the Song dynasty is the beginning of modern China” and “the cultural transformation was completed during the Tang and Song dynasties,” which exerted far-reaching influence in the academic circle. However, although full of the “numerous academic growth points and exuberant academic vitality, the theories have not been well explored and illustrated yet.”1 This paper, taking Liu Yong as a case study, is intended to provide concrete examples to Naito’s theories. The urban narrative in Liu Yong’s lyrics—the multi-role discourse practice of a prodigal poet, a talented lyricist, and a traveling official—inherited the discourse splitting trend of the late-Tang and Five dynasties and finished the transformation from the elite to the mass discourse. Accordingly, it set the narrative mode of amorous themes and discourse mode of “talented lyricist plus amorous affairs,” which exerted far-reaching influence on the construction of the new urban culture in the Song dynasty.
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 description concerning the foreign affairs and exotic imagination in the vernacular fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties, in a way, reveal the Chinese people’s vision of the world, which does not only lend a vivid note on the contemporaneous Sino-foreign relationship and its challenge to the traditional society, but also provides an interesting proof for attesting the “others’ perspective” found at the core of contemporary culture theory. This text expounds the historical and cultural contexts of such description and imagination, especially those of Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand. It makes clear that the exotic areas described in fiction do not necessarily equal to those of real countries existing now. Only after the Qing dynasty, did Chinese fiction begin to give clear features of foreign countries and fully exhibit their literary values. So the change of exotic imagination is the landmark between ancient and modern fictions.
This essay talks about a significant moment in Chinese intellectual and literary history, centrally involving the nature of human happiness, which remains one of the great questions in all philosophical traditions. The Northern Song version of this question continues to have resonance in the contemporary world because we often still link happiness with particular situations and often, like our Northern Song predecessors, with particular sites and possessions. These questions can indeed be found earlier in the Chinese tradition, but in the major social transformations of the Northern Song—a growing commercial culture, and an elite defined by cultural prestige rather than by family background—this question came to enjoy a new intensity of discursive reflection.
The death of Lu Xun (1881–1936), founder of modern Chinese literature, who later became the leader of the intellectual opposition to the Kuomintang government, has never elicited much discussion in Western scholarly circles. The author of this article suggests that may have been due to Lu Xun’s own talent as a sardonic humorist, in that he effectively dismissed speculation on it with his memorable essay on “Death” (Si), written after he had recovered from a bout of illness, but before the days leading up to his actual death. By contrast, there has been contention on the subject in China for over eighty years, resulting in an international investigation that mustered a team of physicians to pour over the still-extant x-ray image of his lungs, learned scholars in both countries to quibble over whether the character wu (five) could be mistaken for san (three), if written cursively, and two worldwide sojourns by Dr. Izumi Hyōnosuke (1930–2018), a Japanese medical historian, in search of the descendants and the ancestral graves of Dr. Thomas Balflour Dunn (1886–1948), the American pulmonary specialist who examined Lu Xun in person. The author of this article was at several points engaged in this multinational project. The article traces the historical origins of the dispute back to the 1930s, continues into the 1980s, and concludes with the current state of affairs in China and Japan, reading the debate against historical evidence (Lu Xun’s diary, correspondence, and the “record of treatment” by his Japanese physician) and the growing international tensions during Lu Xun’s final years.
Compared with pure literature, Liu Cixin’s science fiction novels show a high degree of novelty. Due to his creative accommodation of third world experience and the Chinese cultural spirit of the 1950–70s, he is able to challenge the universal hegemony of the Enlightenment. The deep feelings of Liu Cixin’s novels come from the “guerrilla” character of third world intellectuals who resisted colonization and guarded the country, a resistance derived from China’s vanguard position in the third world independence movement. Liu Cixin’s continuous writing of the story of weakness over power is not only a response to China’s modern and contemporary situation, but also a borrowing from the revolutionary experience to imagine the possibility of another world for readers of the post-revolutionary era.
This essay aims to analyze the types of the historical plays during the War of Resistance Against Japan, reasons for the prosperity of this particular type of play and the historical background. The focus is put on the success of “the historical plays of uniting the chaotic country” by Guo Moruo, “the historical plays of the national crisis” by Aying and Yao Ke and “the historical plays of the peasant uprisings” by Yang Hansheng. The wartime left-wing writers showed great concern for the country and in their works, there are both the political implication of using the past to satirize the present and the complex humanistic feelings. More importantly, the double tragedies of the history and the humanity in these plays remarkably pushed the development of the art of tragedy in China.
This article seeks to reinterpret Wang Zengqi’s (汪曾祺, 1920-97) novels written in the early and mid‐1980s. Through a historical lens, the author examines the era immediately following China’s reform and opening‐up when the political ideal of “distribution according to work” (anlao fenpei) had met with social realities at that time. Departing from the mainstream approach to Wang Zengqi, which oversimplifies China’s process of reforms and opening and consequently reduces Wang Zengqi’s literature to a “pure literature” devoid of social implications, a lyricism of individuals, and a depiction of depoliticized everyday life, this article lays emphasis on the interconnection between Wang Zengqi’s time and his writings. By analyzing the forms and styles of Wang’s novels, the author endeavors to place his writings back in their historical context as a means of rediscovering their underlying meanings and politics hitherto neglected by the scholarship on Chinese literature from the 1980s. Therefore, this article refutes the misconception of Wang Zengqi being a “small writer” and acknowledges the writer’s “bigness” in his writing. In fact, big writers like Wang Zengqi are indispensable in the conception of new political worlds under any historical condition.
Imagination is the lifeline of science fiction. In the 20th century, Chinese science fiction has produced the three distinct imagination modes of desire, possibility, and principles, conveyed through at least five expression techniques in neologisms, verisimilitude, temporal disjunction, situational extremes, and metaphorization. Although imagination is critical to the creation of science fiction, there are polarized views about its nature. A necessary task for the future development of Chinese science fiction is challenging false conceptions of imagination so as to establish more imagination modes.
Although James Joyce and Lu Xun were both writing at a time when a new nation was being created out of former empire, little has been written about the extraordinary synchronicities of their early careers or their common mission. Both understood a new nation must first be created in the hearts and minds of its people. Coming from a medical background, each regarded their countrymen as sick in spirit, paralyzed by slavish dependencies. Joyce saw such servility as fostered by Ireland’s long colonization under the British Crown, a subservience seconded by the “tyranny” of the Roman Catholic Church. For Lu Xun, this spiritual paralysis manifested itself as a legacy of the Confucianism of the late Qing dynasty. Working from a medical model, both writers present a detailed, precise, and cold account of the speech of their characters to reveal the true nature of their disease-while allowing the reader to reach his own diagnosis. By means of this new kind of narrative, both James Joyce and Lu Xun sought to liberate the “soul” or “spirit” of their people, granting them a voice of their own which itself clarified to what extent they had been conscripted by the words of others.
In the view of the relation between science fiction and social reality, the core question of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy is the clash of civilizations between human and Trisolaran, which causes the future possibility of the end of human history. The narrative perspectives of the trilogy are the intelligentsia narrative by Wang Miao (The Three-Body Problem), the heroic narrative by Luo Ji (The Three-Body Problem II: The Dark Forest), and the narrative of “the last man” by Cheng Xin (The Three-Body Problem III: Death’s End). If the future civilization of the human beings is likely to encounter the cosmic catastrophe which is caused by the clash of civilizations between human and aliens, contemporary human elite have to rethink the values of morality and civilization, and bravely creating new history of human by rejecting the temptation of era of the end of history.
This article discusses the role that nature plays in ethnic literature and films in the Seventeen-Year Period (1949–66). It takes the story of Daji and Her Fathers as an example and investigates the ways in which nature features in the reconstruction of ethnic identity in the formation of a multiethnic nation as in the case of China. I will explore three aspects: first, the debate on humanism, which was closely related to ethnic minority film production at the time. A central issue of the debate then was the question of “humanistic”—that is, affective, emotional, subjective, and most importantly, natural—expression in literary and art works. Ethnic minority identity, with its unique status, was given some latitude for humanistic expression and “natural” understanding. Second, due to ethnic minority groups’ special significance in China’s nation-building, a reconstruction of ethnic minority nature became imperative for the People’s Republic of China. This reconstruction involves mostly restructuring a “second nature,” or dialectic nature of minority under the socialist mandate. This dialectic nature demands something more than natural, immediate constituents and requires a socially and politically mediated ethnic minority nature that is aligned with multiethnic nationality. Third, this dialectic nature is to be formed following Marxist dialectical materialism, mainly through the means of social(ist) labor that changes nature.
Jin Shengtan wrote his commentaries to the novel Water Margin (Shuihuzhuan) between 1641 and 1644, during the final years before the fall of the Ming dynasty. These commentaries are exceptional at least in part because they reflect Jin’s frustrations that came from trying to understand this period of chaos. But they are also a good example of how fiction commentary helped to shape the trajectory that the development of Chinese fiction would take, in the form of commentaries and sequels. This article offers a reading of Jin’s commentaries to his 70-chapter edition of the Water Margin, to investigate how Jin radically reshaped the Water Margin as the masterpiece of a commentator of great literary genius. It analyses Jin’s rhetoric of controlling interpretation and concludes that Jin’s ultimate goal was to stabilize and prevent tampering of his “original” 70-chapter edition, in an attempt to close off future possibilities of “sequeling” the Water Margin.
This paper examines the layered nostalgia embodied by one specific spatiotemporal site, the war‐torn Republican capital of Nanjing, in Bai Xianyong’s 1971 collection of short stories Taipei People and in Ye Zhaoyan’s 1996 novel Nanjing 1937: A Love Story. Both Nanjing’s historical reputation as an ancient capital for several short‐lived dynasties and its special role in narrating Chinese identity and cultural traditions across the 1949 divide contribute to the city’s symbolic significance in the literary tradition of ruin gazing. In the two texts under discussion, the layered ruins of Republican Nanjing—reminiscent of the decadent Six Dynasties (220–589) and witnessing the historical violence and physical as well as metaphorical dislocation resulting from World War II and the Chinese Civil War—constitute an ideal site for reflecting upon not only personal and national traumas but also traditional‐modern tensions from diversified stances and angles. The related but divergent trajectories taken by Bai’s and Ye’s nostalgic gaze—one projected from the United States in the 1960s by way of post‐1949 Taipei and the other geographically located in contemporary Nanjing but culturally distanced from it—form an interesting dialogue, which may shed light on the fluidity of ruin gazing at a nexus of identity questions with reference to the embrace of modernity.
The emergence of the practice of quoting The Classic of Poetry (Shijing) is the result of a separation in the ethical function of rites and music. At first, quoting the Poetry is a means to correct people’s pronunciations, but gradually its function changes from the rectification of sound to the rectification of social norms, and by the time of the Warring States period, Qin dynasty, and Han dynasty, the expression “the Poetry says” (Shiyue) has become an emblem of social values through which the writer justifies his own arguments. But although more than 400 cases of such use of the Poetry can be found in Han rhapsodies (Fu), none of the rhapsody-titled works contain expressions such as “the Poetry says.” On the one hand, this results from the sound and rhythmical requirements of chanting the rhapsody. On the other, this shows the gradual reawakening of the writers’ self-consciousness in a period when old political and social orders are restored. This stylistic change releases the creative energy of the literary language that helps reconstruct the artistic conception of rhapsodies and stimulates the emergence and flourishing of new literary genres such as five-syllable-line poetry (Wuyanshi), seven-syllable-line poetry (Qiyanshi), parallel prose (Piantiwen), and Chu-style prose (Saotiwen).
The author of this paper attempts to make a detailed analysis of the impact the notion of the cultural turn exerted upon the translation studies at home, and to explore the historical elements of the notion and its inevitability of the emergence. The author also intends, at the conclusion of the paper, to present his view on the broad vista that the notion of the cultural turn has opened up the new areas for the current translation studies.
This paper examines the performative significance of Lu Xun’s historical short stories collected in Gushi xinbian (Old stories retold, 1936) by focusing on the mediality of his idiosyncratic writing, which he himself called “facetious.” It revisits the young Lu Xun’s uneasy engagement with medical science as student documented in his lecture notebooks bearing corrections by his teacher as well as his early essays. This provides an analytical framework for discussing the stakes of his historical fiction as a critique of the discourse of scientific historiography which was increasingly gaining currency in May Fourth China. Lu Xun’s historical fiction is conspicuously not meant to function as a stable medium between the past and the present but betrays its opaque and even arbitrary mediality, which disrupts identity in historical representation and thus critiques ideological, “cultural” power inherent in scientific discourse that tries to establish that identity. The paper then reads Gushi xinbian as attempts at recovering history from such power and envisioning new possibilities of historical transmission in the midst of an aporetic search of a prehistory of Chinese modernity—attempts hinged on anachronistic textual moments whose meanings circulate in defiance of any identity of time with itself, thereby bespeaking an alternative power to “make” history.
Lu Xun situated himself at the crossroads of agricultural tradition and modernist inception during the tumultuous Republican period. As a result, fraught with his affection towards his origins and aiming to register his modernist sensibilities, he widely scattered various animals throughout his fiction and essays. However, more scholarly attention should be paid to the theoretical interpretations of these nonhuman historical and affective agencies and they deserve to be regarded as unique references to the social and political representations of the Republican era. This paper analyzes how Lu Xun represents animal images and discusses the relationship between animality and humanity in his writings. Employing eco-criticism and Foucauldian bio-politics, I argue that the animalistic reading of “A Madman’s Diary” contrasts with the conventional cannibalistic reading and marks a revolutionary beginning to Lu Xun’s concern towards animality and humanity. Later echoing with the social Darwinism popular at the time, Lu Xun invests more nuanced affects in three different categories of animals through which he contemplates domestication, vulnerability, and self-definition. Finally, I argue that by inventing a discourse of animality and humanity, Lu Xun casts his pioneering gaze on Chinese morality, modern subjectivity, and the natural environment.
Unlike Hu Shih and Chen Duxiu, among other leading intellectuals in the May Fourth New Literature Movement, Lu Xun had no experience of writing in vernacular Chinese (baihua) in his early years. Except Jules Verne’s two novels translated by Lu Xun in the 1900s, all his translations and writings before 1918 were produced in classical Chinese (wenyan), until “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji) was published in May 1918. Despite the well-known fact that Lu Xun wrote his first vernacular fiction at the quest of Qian Xuantong, the sudden and seemingly effortless change in Lu Xun’s linguistic choice remains a mystery. This article attempts to shed new light on the problem by focusing on Lu Xun’s understanding and practice of voices (sheng) in his early works. First, I explore the meaning of the term “voices of the heart” (xinsheng) in Lu Xun’s thoughts and connect it to the rendering of subjectivity in his writings and translations in the late Qing dynasty. The archaic style he chose implies, paradoxically, both his effort to deliver inner “voices of the heart” and his self-awareness of the difficulty in conveying it. Then along this line, I try to grasp Lu Xun’s intrinsic motivation for the change in his linguistic choice. Vernacular Chinese provided Lu Xun with a channel of constructing inter-subjectivity by appealing to a broad public, thus emancipating him from the dilemma of expressing “voices of the heart.” Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, Lu Xun’s perception and application of written language were closely interwoven with his concern for subjectivity.
Takeuchi Yoshimi is one of the very few postwar Japanese intellectuals to openly engage in discussions on Asia intricacy and to deal with the most complicated component of the Japan–Asia relationship: problems of emotion. One key feature of Takeuchi’s approach lies in the fact that he is not only a profound thinker but also a sensitive litterateur. For this reason, in addition to the fact that it is already very difficult to form an objective and widely agreed view on Takeuchi and his approach, it is hard to avoid the emotional aspect when evaluating his thoughts. This essay does not aim to discuss his rights and wrongs; rather, it is an attempt to analyze the inner logic of Takeuchi’s thoughts, to understand and grasp the intensity and structure of his thoughts and emotions, and to demonstrate where his sense of urgency lies, thereby allowing to view the examination of the diverse and complex nature of discourses on Asianism in Japan in a new light.