Author: Han Shaogong Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback ISBN: 0385339356 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
From the daring imagination of one of China’s greatest living novelists comes a work of startling power and originality–the story of a young man “displaced” to a small village in rural China during the 1960s. Told in the format of a dictionary, with a series of vignettes disguised as entries, A Dictionary of Maqiao is a novel of bold invention–and a fascinating, comic, deeply moving journey through the dark heart of the Cultural Revolution. Entries trace the wisdom and absurdities of Maqiao: the petty squabbles, family grudges, poverty, infidelities, fantasies, lunatics, bullies, superstitions, and especially the odd logic in their use of language–where the word for “beginning” is the same as the word for “end”; “little big brother” means older sister; to be “scientific” means to be lazy; and “streetsickness” is a disease afflicting villagers visiting urban areas. Filled with colorful characters–from a weeping ox to a man so poisonous that snakes die when they bite him–A Dictionary of Maqiao is both an important work of Chinese literature and a probing inquiry into the extraordinary power of language.
Author: Wen Zhu Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231136943 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 254
Book Description
In five richly imaginative novellas and a short story, Zhu Wen depicts the violence, chaos, and dark comedy of China in the post-Mao era. A frank reflection of the seamier side of his nation's increasingly capitalist society, Zhu Wen's fiction offers an audaciously plainspoken account of the often hedonistic individualism that is feverishly taking root. Set against the mundane landscapes of contemporary China-a worn Yangtze River vessel, cheap diners, a failing factory, a for-profit hospital operating by dated socialist norms-Zhu Wen's stories zoom in on the often tragicomic minutiae of everyday life in this fast-changing country. With subjects ranging from provincial mafiosi to nightmarish families and oppressed factory workers, his claustrophobic narratives depict a spiritually bankrupt society, periodically rocked by spasms of uncontrolled violence. For example, I Love Dollars, a story about casual sex in a provincial city whose caustic portrayal of numb disillusionment and cynicism, caused an immediate sensation in the Chinese literary establishment when it was first published. The novella's loose, colloquial voice and sharp focus on the indignity and iniquity of a society trapped between communism and capitalism showcase Zhu Wen's exceptional ability to make literary sense of the bizarre, ideologically confused amalgam that is contemporary China. Julia Lovell's fluent translation deftly reproduces Zhu Wen's wry sense of humor and powerful command of detail and atmosphere. The first book-length publication of Zhu Wen's fiction in English, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China offers readers access to a trailblazing author and marks a major contribution to Chinese literature in English.
Author: Julia Lovell Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic ISBN: 155584832X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
A “gripping, colorful” history of China’s Great Wall that explores the conquests and cataclysms of the empire from 1000 BC to the present day (Publishers Weekly). Over two thousand years old, the Great Wall of China is a symbolic and physical dividing line between the civilized Chinese and the “barbarians” at their borders. Historian Julia Lovell looks behind the intimidating fortification and its mythology to uncover a complex history far more fragmented and less illustrious that its crowds of visitors imagine today. Lovell’s story winds through the lives of the millions of individuals who built and attacked it, and recounts how succeeding dynasties built sections of the wall as defenses against the invading Huns, Mongols, and Turks, and how the Ming dynasty, in its quest to create an empire, joined the regional ramparts to make what the Chinese call the “10,000 Li” or the “long wall.” An epic that reveals the true history of a nation, The Great Wall is “a supremely inviting entrée to the country” and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand China’s past, present, and future (Booklist).
Author: Esme Winter-Froemel Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110630877 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
The book series is dedicated to the study of the multifaceted dynamics of wordplay as an interface phenomenon. The contributions aim to bring together approaches from various disciplines and present case studies on different communicative settings, inluding everyday language and literary communication, and thus offer fresh perspectives on wordplay in the context of linguistic innovation, language contact, and speaker-hearer-interaction. La collection vise à analyser la diversité de la dynamique du jeu de mots en tant que phénomène d’interface. Les contributions réunissent les approches de différentes disciplines et présentent des études de cas de situations de communication variées, incluant tant le langage quotidien que la communication littéraire. Ainsi, elles offrent de nouvelles perspectives sur le jeu de mots dans le contexte de l’innovation linguistique, du contact linguistique, et de l’interaction locuteur-interlocuteur. Editorial Board: Salvatore Attardo (Texas A&M University Commerce, USA), Dirk Delabastita (Université de Namur, Belgium), Dirk Geeraerts (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium), Raymond W. Gibbs (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA), Alain Rabatel (Université de Lyon 1 /ICAR, UMR 5191, CNRS, Université Lumière-Lyon 2, ENS-Lyon, France), Monika Schmitz-Emans (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany), Deirdre Wilson (University College London, UK)
Author: Lu Xun Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141194189 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 534
Book Description
Lu Xun (Lu Hsun) is arguably the greatest writer of modern China, and is considered by many to be the founder of modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun's stories both indict outdated Chinese traditions and embrace China's cultural richness and individuality. This volume presents brand-new translations by Julia Lovell of all of Lu Xun's stories, including 'The Real Story of Ah-Q', 'Diary of a Madman', 'A Comedy of Ducks', 'The Divorce' and 'A Public Example', among others. With an afterword by Yiyun Li.
Author: Qingxin Lin Publisher: Hong Kong University Press ISBN: 9789622096974 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
This book explores some essential features of the Chinese new historical fiction (NHF) and its socio-cultural implications. It argues that the NHF constitutes an oppositional discourse that rejects, both the grand narrative of linear (revolutionary) history, which dominates Chinese official historiography, and naïve confidence in 'Chinese modernity.'
Author: Howard Yuen Fung Choy Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004167048 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
This study investigates how writers of Deng Xiaopinga (TM)s China undermined the grand narrative of official history by rewriting the past. It showcases fictions of history by eleven Chinese, Muslim and Tibetan authors in terms of spatial schemes of fictional historiography.
Author: Qian Zhongshu Publisher: New Directions Publishing ISBN: 081122354X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 416
Book Description
The greatest Chinese novel of the twentieth century, Fortress Besieged is a classic of world literature, a masterpiece of parodic fiction that plays with Western literary traditions, philosophy, and middle-class Chinese society in the Republican era. Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, our hapless hero Fang Hung-chien (á la Emma Bovary), with no particular goal in life and with a bogus degree from a fake American university in hand, returns home to Shanghai. On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, "With Miss Pao it wasn't a matter of heart or soul. She hadn't any change of heart, since she didn't have a heart." In a sort of painful comedy, Fang obtains a teaching post at a newly established university where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian's merciless satire. Soon Fang is trapped into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. Recalling Fielding's Tom Jones in its farcical litany of misadventures and Flaubert's "style indirect libre," Fortress Besieged is its own unique feast of delights.
Author: Kirk A. Denton Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231541147 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 818
Book Description
The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature features more than fifty short essays on specific writers and literary trends from the Qing period (1895–1911) to the present. The volume opens with thematic essays on the politics and ethics of writing literary history, the formation of the canon, the relationship between language and form, the role of literary institutions and communities, the effects of censorship, the representation of the Chinese diaspora, the rise and meaning of Sinophone literature, and the role of different media in the development of literature. Subsequent essays focus on authors, their works, and the schools with which they were aligned, featuring key names, titles, and terms in English and in Chinese characters. Woven throughout are pieces on late Qing fiction, popular entertainment fiction, martial arts fiction, experimental theater, post-Mao avant-garde poetry, post–martial law fiction from Taiwan, contemporary genre fiction from China, and recent Internet literature. The volume includes essays on such authors as Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, Jin Yong, Mo Yan, Wang Anyi, Gao Xingjian, and Yan Lianke. Both a teaching tool and a go-to research companion, this volume is a one-of-a-kind resource for mastering modern literature in the Chinese-speaking world.
Author: Han Shaogong
Author: Wen Zhu
Author: Michael Sollars
Author: Julia Lovell
Author: Esme Winter-Froemel
Author: Lu Xun
Author: Qingxin Lin
Author: Howard Yuen Fung Choy
Author: Qian Zhongshu
Author: Kirk A. Denton