This volume is about studies of Shen Congwen (1902-1988), one of the most important writers in modern China, but more importantly, it is about how Shen Congwen has been received in and beyond Mainland China. By presenting the best literary criticism on Shen Congwen in Mainland China over the past 80 years, and views of how Shen Congwen has been understood, interpreted, and appreciated in Japan, the US, and Europe, the editors propose a new way to approach the topics of canonic writers, modern Chinese literature, and world literature. This is itself a translated project. Its Chinese edition appeared in May 2017. The bilingual rendering of the best criticism of Shen Congwen from a global perspective intends to initiate and advance dialogues between Chinese- and English- language scholarly communities. We strive to explore the complexities of "worldwide" images and interpretations of Shen Congwen. By calling attention to the foreign spaces into which overseas Shen Congwens and modern Chinese literature are reborn as world literature, we acknowledge and celebrate the study of Shen Congwen and modern Chinese literature as ongoing and endless cross-cultural dialogues and manifestations.

Originally published in 1934, "Border Town" tells the story of Cuicui, a young country girl who is coming of age during a time of national turmoil. The granddaughter of a poor ferryman, Cuicui grows up in Chadong, a small town in China's exotic southwestern frontier, where she is sheltered from the warlord fighting that was prevalent in China in the 1920s. Like any teenager, Cuicui dreams of romance and finding true love. She's caught up in the spell of the local custom of nighttime serenades, but she is also haunted by her grandfather's aging and imminent death. Both Cuicui and her grandfather know that she must find a husband who will take care of her once her grandfather is gone. Cuicui is pursued by two brothers - strong and brusque Tianbao, whose name means 'Heaven-protected', and his younger brother Nuosong ('Sent by the Nuo Gods') who is known for the fineness of his face and voice. Not wholly bound by the dictates of arranged marriage, Cuicui is prepared to make her choice based on love, but she is confounded by fate and her grandfather, who wishes for her to mature on her own.

This volume gathers personal reflections on life and literature by 44 of China's leading authors. It aims to illustrate how Chinese society and its creative writing have supported, competed and fought with each other for the past 40 years and more. Much of what is revealed here is mundane, but the pressure of bringing art to social and political causes, indeed the universal pressure to survive, forges this collection into a very human document. The strengths and weaknesses of these essays offer a window on those of modern Chinese literature itself. Realism was the favoured literary doctrine of the day, and, reflecting this, most of these essays speak for themselves - about war, revolution, betrayal and commitment.

During the first thirty years under communism, China completely banned crime fiction. After Mao, however, crime genres of all kinds--old and new, Chinese and Western--sprang up in profusion. Crime narrative again became one of the most prolific and best-loved forms of Chinese popular culture, and it often embodied the Chinese people's most trenchant and open critiques of their newly restored socialist legal system.
This is the first full-length study in any language of Chinese crime fiction in all eras: ancient, modern, and contemporary. It is also the first book to apply legal scholars' "law and literature" inquiry to the rich field of Chinese legal and literary culture. Familiar Holmesian, quintessentially Chinese, and bizarre East-West hybrids of plots, crimes, detectives, judges, suspects, and ideas of law and corruption emerge from the pages of China's new crime fiction, which is alternately embraced and condemned by the Chinese establishment as it lurches uncertainly toward post-communist society.
Informed by contemporary comparative and theoretical perspectives on popular culture and the fiction of crime and detection, this book is based on extensive readings of Chinese crime fiction and interviews--in China and abroad--with the communist regime's exiled and still-in-power security and judicial officers. It was in the Orwellian year of 1984 that the authorities set out to control China's crime fiction and even to manufacture it themselves--only to find that fiction, like the social phenomena it depicts, seems destined to remain one step ahead of the law.

This is an engagingly written memoir, originally published in English in 1990, by one of China's finest writers. Born in 1910, Hsiao Ch'ien joined the Communist Youth League and participated in demonstrations against the government before working with Edgar Snow as a translator and publishing his own fiction. He has worked in England and America, becoming friends with E.M. Forster and Bertrand Russell and reported the Nurembourg trials. After returning to China in 1949, he was soon in trouble with the authorities and served 16 years at hard labour. He was formally rehabilitated in 1979 and is today working on the translation into Chinese of James Joyce's Ulysses.

This volume is about studies of Shen Congwen (1902-1988), one of the most important writers in modern China, but more importantly, it is about how Shen Congwen has been received in and beyond Mainland China. By presenting the best literary criticism on Shen Congwen in Mainland China over the past 80 years, and views of how Shen Congwen has been understood, interpreted, and appreciated in Japan, the US, and Europe, the editors propose a new way to approach the topics of canonic writers, modern Chinese literature, and world literature. This is itself a translated project. Its Chinese edition appeared in May 2017. The bilingual rendering of the best criticism of Shen Congwen from a global perspective intends to initiate and advance dialogues between Chinese- and English- language scholarly communities. We strive to explore the complexities of "worldwide" images and interpretations of Shen Congwen. By calling attention to the foreign spaces into which overseas Shen Congwens and modern Chinese literature are reborn as world literature, we acknowledge and celebrate the study of Shen Congwen and modern Chinese literature as ongoing and endless cross-cultural dialogues and manifestations.

The depiction of personal and collective suffering in modern Chinese novels differs significantly from standard Communist accounts and many Eastern and Western historical narratives. Writers such as Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Ge Fei, Li Rui, and Zhang Wei skew and scramble common conceptions of China's modern development, deploying avant-garde narrative techniques from Latin American and Euro-American modernism to project a surprisingly "un-Chinese" dystopian vision and critical view of human culture and ethics. The epic narratives of modern Chinese fiction make rich use of magical realism, surrealism, and unusual treatments of historical time. Also featuring graphic depictions of sex and violence, as well as dark, raunchy comedy, these novels reflect China's recent history re-presenting the overthrow of the monarchy in the early twentieth century and the resulting chaos of revolution and war; the recurring miseries perpetrated by class warfare during the dictatorship of Mao Zedong; and the social dislocations caused by China's industrialization and rise as a global power. This book casts China's highbrow historical novels from the late 1980s to the first decade of the twenty-first century as a distinctively Chinese contribution to the form of the global dystopian novel and, consequently, to global thinking about the interrelations of utopia and dystopia.

During the first thirty years under communism, China completely banned crime fiction. After Mao, however, crime genres of all kinds--old and new, Chinese and Western--sprang up in profusion. Crime narrative again became one of the most prolific and best-loved forms of Chinese popular culture, and it often embodied the Chinese people's most trenchant and open critiques of their newly restored socialist legal system.
This is the first full-length study in any language of Chinese crime fiction in all eras: ancient, modern, and contemporary. It is also the first book to apply legal scholars' "law and literature" inquiry to the rich field of Chinese legal and literary culture. Familiar Holmesian, quintessentially Chinese, and bizarre East-West hybrids of plots, crimes, detectives, judges, suspects, and ideas of law and corruption emerge from the pages of China's new crime fiction, which is alternately embraced and condemned by the Chinese establishment as it lurches uncertainly toward post-communist society.
Informed by contemporary comparative and theoretical perspectives on popular culture and the fiction of crime and detection, this book is based on extensive readings of Chinese crime fiction and interviews--in China and abroad--with the communist regime's exiled and still-in-power security and judicial officers. It was in the Orwellian year of 1984 that the authorities set out to control China's crime fiction and even to manufacture it themselves--only to find that fiction, like the social phenomena it depicts, seems destined to remain one step ahead of the law.

A master of the modern short story and one of the finest Chinese prose stylists of all time, Shen Congwen (1902-1988) left a body of work acclaimed for its thematic and emotive range, its innovative literary beauty, and its continuing popularity and influence. Imperfect Paradise provides the most comprehensive and authoritative representation in English of the remarkable Shen Congwen canon, ranging from the polished stories that made him a serious contender for the Nobel literary prize in the 1980s to lesser known, extravagant experimental pieces.

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.

This volume gathers personal reflections on life and literature by 44 of China's leading authors. It aims to illustrate how Chinese society and its creative writing have supported, competed and fought with each other for the past 40 years and more. Much of what is revealed here is mundane, but the pressure of bringing art to social and political causes, indeed the universal pressure to survive, forges this collection into a very human document. The strengths and weaknesses of these essays offer a window on those of modern Chinese literature itself. Realism was the favoured literary doctrine of the day, and, reflecting this, most of these essays speak for themselves - about war, revolution, betrayal and commitment.