Jeffrey C. Kinkley

Congwen Shen

First published in 1934, Border Town brings to life the story of Cuicui, a young country girl coming of age during a time of national turmoil. Like any teenager, Cuicui dreams of romance and finding true love. She's spellbound by the local custom of nighttime serenades, and she is deftly pursued by two eligible brothers. But Cuicui is also haunted by the imminent death of her grandfather, a poor and honorable ferryman who is her only family. As she grows up, Cuicui discovers that life is full of the unexpected and that she alone will make the choices that determine her destiny. A moving testament to the human spirit, Border Town is a beautifully written novel, considered Shen Congwen's masterpiece for its brilliant portrayal of Chinese rural life before the Communist revolution.

A Novel

Border Town

Helmut Martin

This volume gathers personal reflections on life and literature by 44 of China's leading authors. It aims to illustrate how Chinese society and its creative writing have supported, competed and fought with each other for the past 40 years and more. Much of what is revealed here is mundane, but the pressure of bringing art to social and political causes, indeed the universal pressure to survive, forges this collection into a very human document. The strengths and weaknesses of these essays offer a window on those of modern Chinese literature itself. Realism was the favoured literary doctrine of the day, and, reflecting this, most of these essays speak for themselves - about war, revolution, betrayal and commitment.

Self-portrayals

Modern Chinese Writers: Self-portrayals

Writing about writing is a recognized and respected genre in Chinese literature, usually taking the form of autobiographical essays in which writers explain how they pursue their craft amidst the political, economic, emotional, and artistic conditions of their world. Selected for their varying perspectives, 44 such essays reveal personal insights on the past 40 years of Chinese life. Paper edition (unseen), $22. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Modern Chinese Writers

This is a full-length study of Chinese crime fiction in all eras: ancient, modern, and contemporary. It is also the first book to apply legal scholars law and literature inquiry to the rich field of Chinese legal and literary culture.

Law and Literature in Modern China

Chinese Justice, the Fiction

The depiction of personal and collective suffering in modern Chinese novels differs significantly from standard Communist accounts and many Eastern and Western historical narratives. Writers such as Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Ge Fei, Li Rui, and Zhang Wei skew and scramble common conceptions of China's modern development, deploying avant-garde narrative techniques from Latin American and Euro-American modernism to project a surprisingly "un-Chinese" dystopian vision and critical view of human culture and ethics. The epic narratives of modern Chinese fiction make rich use of magical realism, surrealism, and unusual treatments of historical time. Also featuring graphic depictions of sex and violence, as well as dark, raunchy comedy, these novels reflect China's recent history re-presenting the overthrow of the monarchy in the early twentieth century and the resulting chaos of revolution and war; the recurring miseries perpetrated by class warfare during the dictatorship of Mao Zedong; and the social dislocations caused by China's industrialization and rise as a global power. This book casts China's highbrow historical novels from the late 1980s to the first decade of the twenty-first century as a distinctively Chinese contribution to the form of the global dystopian novel and, consequently, to global thinking about the interrelations of utopia and dystopia.

Visions of Dystopia in China’s New Historical Novels

The depiction of personal and collective suffering in modern Chinese novels differs significantly from standard Communist accounts and most Eastern and Western historical narratives. Writers such as Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Ge Fei, Li Rui, and Zhang Wei scramble common conceptions of ChinaÕs modern development, deploying avant-garde narrative techniques from Latin American and Euro-American modernism to project a surprisingly Òun-ChineseÓ dystopian vision and critical view of human culture and ethics. The epic narratives of modern Chinese fiction make rich use of magical realism, surrealism, and unusual treatments of historical time. Also featuring graphic depictions of sex and violence and dark, raunchy comedy, these novels deeply reflect ChinaÕs turbulent recent history, re-presenting the overthrow of the monarchy in the early twentieth century and the resulting chaos of revolution and war; the recurring miseries perpetrated by class warfare during the dictatorship of Mao Zedong; and the social dislocations caused by ChinaÕs industrialization and rise as a global power. This book casts ChinaÕs highbrow historical novels from the 1990s to the mid-2000s as a distinctively Chinese contribution to the form of the global dystopian novel and, consequently, to global thinking about the interrelations of utopia and dystopia.

Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels

Shen Congwen

New in the Harper Perennial Modern Chinese Classics series, Border Town is a classic Chinese novel—banned by Mao’s regime—that captures the ideals of rural China through the moving story of a young woman and her grandfather. Originally published in 1934 by author Shen Congwen, this beautifully written novel tells the story of Cuicui, a young country girl who is coming of age in rural China in the tumultuous time before the communist revolution.

Jeffrey C. Kinkley

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