The Monster That Is History History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China

"Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese - often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude - this book places its arguments at the intersection of two related areas: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity."--back cover.