- Paperback: 412 pages
- Publisher: University of California Press; New Ed edition (17 Aug 2004)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0520238737
- ISBN-13: 978-0520238732
- Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 15 x 2.5 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 479,441 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Product Description
In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until it became identifiable with history itself. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese - often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude - this book places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers modern Chinese history as a complex of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and personal articulations of bygone and ongoing events. His discussion ranges from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of hunger and starvation to the technology of crime and punishment.
About the Author
David Der-wei Wang is Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Fin-de-Siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernity of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (1997) and Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (1992). He is the coeditor of Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey (2000).
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First Sentence
Linnuyu, or Women's Words Overheard (1902-1904), by Youhuan Yusheng (Survivor of calamities, pseudonym of Lian Mengqing, 18??-after 1914), is one of the first late Qing narratives about the atrocities of the Boxer Rebellion. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
Linnuyu, or Women's Words Overheard (1902-1904), by Youhuan Yusheng (Survivor of calamities, pseudonym of Lian Mengqing, 18??-after 1914), is one of the first late Qing narratives about the atrocities of the Boxer Rebellion. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Rethinking Fiction and History
20 July 2009
Format:Paperback
Wang's masterful take on the violent modern history of China deftly combines literary studies and historical investigations to explore historical and literary meanings. How does one survive and account for atrocity and sufferings? The author is sensitive to the pitfalls of writing about such subject matter ("one person's account of 'tears and blood' may achieve nothing more than a second person's undeserved catharsis"). On modern Chinese readers' and writers' demands of literature as a radical agency of change, Wang has this to say: "modern Chinese representation of violence can be underwritten as a violence of representation." Beautifully written and enlightening throughout. Highly recommended to any one who cares about modern China and that country's unparalleled literary creativity in the face of a violent history. Chapter 8, "Second Haunting," is especially important.
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