The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures-轻识

Rather than attempt to offer a definition of modern Chinese literature or provide a comprehensive survey of all that the category might entail, this volume instead uses a series of strategic interventions to illustrate the structural conditions out of which modern Chinese literature has emerged, how it is viewed, and how it may be interpreted. Our goal, in other words, is to showcase a set of methodologies that one may use to approach modern Chinese literature, while in the process offering different ways of reassessing what modern Chinese literature is in the first place. We contend that modern Chinese literature is not a static category but rather it is a dynamic entity whose significance and limits are continually being reshaped through the process of interpretation itself. Similarly, modern Chinese literature is not a singular, unitary category, but rather a plurality of overlapping categories—of modern Chinese literatures. Divided into three parts, on “structure,” “taxonomy,” and “methodology,” this volume contains 46 original articles that examine unfamiliar texts and literary phenomena and offer new perspectives on more familiar ones.

Carlos Rojas, editor

Carlos Rojas is Associate Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University, and his research focuses on issues of gender and visuality, corporeality and infection, nationalism and diaspora studies. He is the author of The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Harvard University Press, 2010) and The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008). He is the co-editor, with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, of Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (Routledge: 2009) and, with David Der-wei Wang, of Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (Duke University Press, 2007). He is also the translator of Yan Lianke’s novel Lenin’s Kisses, and the co-translator, again with Eileen Chow, of Yu Hua’s two-volume novel, Brothers (Pantheon, 2009).

Andrea Bachner, editor

Andrea Bachner is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Her research explores comparative intersections between Sinophone, Latin American, and European cultural productions in dialogue with theories of interculturality, sexuality, and mediality. She is the author of Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Cultures (Columbia University Press).