Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature

Contested Modernities brings together the work of twelve scholars of modern Chinese culture which, from a multiplicity of perspectives, interrogates the myth of modern Chinese culture as a belated or diluted form of the Western experience of modernity. Articles on fiction, drama, film and literary historiography throughout the twentieth century are organized into sections on Rewriting Literary History, The Quotidian Apocalypse and The Moral Subject under Global Capitalism. From the intersecting angles of historical retrospect, shifting historical consciousness, and moral imagination, all show how Chinese cultural producers continue to carve out their own modernisms, neither essentially Chinese nor simply Western.

Charles A. Laughlin is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature, Yale University.