Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century

This volume aims at a preliminary survey of modern Chinese literature in the second half of the 20th century. It has three goals: 1) to introduce figures, works, movements and debates that constitute the dynamics of Chinese literature from 1949 to the end of the century; 2) to depict the enunciative endeavours, ranging from ideological treatises to avant-garde experiments, that inform the polyphonic discourse of Chinese cultural politics; and 3) to observe the historical factor that enacted the interplay of literary (post)modernities across the Chinese communities in the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas. The exsisting paradigm of modern Chinese literary studies treats the May Fourth movement as the harbinger of literary modernization and 1949, the year of the Chinese Communist seizure of mainland China, as the point where this modernity project came to an abrupt end. Beyond 1949, Chinese literature is said to have been conditioned by political antagonisms and historical turmoil, so much so that it falls short of the formal and conceptual rigour that allegedly characterizes its predecessors. Such a scenario makes 1949 the landmark of the great divide and treats modern Chinese literary development like two discrete segments of the pre-1949 era versus the post-1949 era. This is an ill-informed notion. Although Chinese literature since 1949 has suffered from numerous political interventions, as most poignantly attested to by the atrocities of the Great Cultural Revolution, Chinese writers have never ceased to churn out strong works whenever they have been given a chance. Meanwhile, literature in Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas communities have contributed some of the most stimulating dimension to the corpus of Chinese literature since the mid-century."