The emergence of the Chinese socialist realist novel can best be understood in light of the half-century long formation of the modern concept of literature in China. Globalized in the wake of modern capitalism, literary modernity configures the literary text in a relationship to both modern philosophy and literary theory. This book traces China's unique, complex, and creative a...(展开全部)

The Chinese essay is arguably China’s most distinctive contribution to modern world literature, and the period of its greatest influence and popularity—the mid-1930s—is the central concern of this book. What Charles Laughlin terms "the literature of leisure" is a modern literary response to the cultural past that manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of short, informa...(展开全部)

Table of Contents Illustrations Note on Romanization Preface: An Invitation to Explore the City 1 Introduction: The City in Modern Chinese Cultural History 2 Urban Configurations: Small Town, Ancient Capital, Modern Metropolis 3 Mapping the Ancient Capital of Beijing 4 The Symbolic Triumph of Chinese Tradition in Beijing 5 Reading the Illegible Metropolis of Shanghai 6 Th...(展开全部)

The civil service examination essay known as shiwen (modern or contemporary prose) or bagu wen (eight-legged essay) for its complex structure was the most widely read and written literary genre in early modern China (1450–1850). As the primary mode of expression in which educated individuals were schooled, shiwen epitomized the literary enterprise even beyond the walls of the e...(展开全部)

The civil service examination essay known as shiwen (modern or contemporary prose) or bagu wen (eight-legged essay) for its complex structure was the most widely read and written literary genre in early modern China (1450–1850). As the primary mode of expression in which educated individuals were schooled, shiwen epitomized the literary enterprise even beyond the walls of the e...(展开全部)

Rapid industrialization, urbanization, and marketization have led to startling social changes in reform-era China. Mindful of the many forms of social theory that relate modernity to individualism, this volume addresses social and cultural change through the lens of psychological anthropology. The contributors explore Chinese modernity through the psychosocial contradictions ex...(展开全部)

We live in a world shaped by secularism - the separation of numinous power from political authority and religion from the political, social, and economic realms of public life. Not only has progress toward modernity often been equated with secularization, but when religion is admitted into modernity, it has been distinguished from superstition. That such ideas are continually c...(展开全部)

Today, Chinese characters are described as a national treasure, the core of the nation’s civilizational identity. Yet for nearly half of the twentieth century, reformers waged war on the Chinese script. They declared it an archaic hindrance to modernization, portraying the ancient system of writing as a roadblock to literacy and therefore science and democracy. Movements spanni...(展开全部)

In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two mil...(展开全部)