scholarly journals Modern Chinese Fiction (1919–1949) in Russia: Early Translation, Publication and Research

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-18
Author(s):  
Xiaoling She ◽  
◽  
Jian Wen ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Modern Chinese Fiction ◽  
Early Translation

The article provides an overview of early Russian translations and publication of modern Chinese fiction (1919-1949). The approaches to the early study of the works of prominent representatives of modern Chinese literature are examined and the reasons why Soviet society is interested in their heritage are identified. Since the 1920s, well-known works of renowned Chinese writers have been frequently translated into Russian mainly by young sinologists. Most of them had been to China and had developed a direct understanding of the development of modern Chinese literature, translating primarily from Chinese and using English translations for various reasons occasionally. The Chinese and Soviet cultural activists also played an important role in the spread of modern Chinese prose in the USSR. At the same time, a serious study of modern Chinese prose began, and until the end of the 1940s was actually at the initial stage, being mainly of a socio-political nature as the study was determined by the state of the ideological atmosphere in Soviet society. Early researchers paid the most attention to the works of Lu Xun, referring to his ideological outlook and artistic merits. Overall, the early translation and study of modern Chinese fiction revealed to the Soviet reader the ideological and social aspects of the works of modern novelists belonging to the left flank of Chinese literature, and laid the foundation for more extensive and in-depth research of modern Chinese literature during the next phase.

scholarly journals 中国现当代小说中的故乡构建初探 (Literary Nativism, the Native Place and Modern Chinese Fiction)

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiyan Wang
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
National Representation ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
Abstract Notion ◽  
Modern Chinese Fiction ◽  
The One ◽  
Native Place

Although the importance of the native place in Chinese life is beyond dispute and it has been a significant preoccupation of Chinese authors throughout history, literary representations of the native place still remain to be studied systematically. This paper attempts to examine the construction of the native place in modern Chinese fiction and its role in literary representations of China. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the native place in Chinese literature remained an abstract notion without specific geographical locations and the narrative focus was on the ‘native-place sentiment’ (Bryna Goodman 1995). It is a modern phenomenon that the native place appears as a local cultural space with ethnographic details and is closely related to the need for narrating China, although it can still be abstract and symbolic. The construction of the native place is crucial in the project of national narration for modern Chinese fiction, as it is often created as the nation’s cultural origin and authentication. However, the relationship between the native place and national representation in Chinese fiction is paradoxical, because, on the one hand the native place necessarily differs in origin, and on the other hand, many Chinese authors are devoted to China as a cultural totality. This paper will focus on the paradoxical relationship between the authors’ nativist aspirations to create distinctive local cultural identities and their commitment to the abstract idea of a single Chinese nation. Furthermore, both the native place and national narration are intricately associated with the tendency of literary nativism, i.e. the belief and the practice that literary writing should focus on constructing the native place and that the narrative style should continue and develop the indigenous narrative traditions. In other words, poetics is part of the politics in the configuration of the native place. The initial questions I shall try to answer include: How is the native place viewed and configured in modern Chinese fiction? What kinds of local stories are generated as national tales and what is the role of the native place in such narratives? Why do writers ‘write local but think national’? Why do national myths in Chinese regional literatures compete to identify with the central nation-state?

The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China. By David Der-Wei Wang. [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004. 402 pp. ISBN 0-520-23140-6.]

2005 ◽  
Vol 182 ◽  
pp. 439-441
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Eileen Chang ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Revolutionary Literature

This celebration of modern Chinese literature is a tour de force, David Wang's third major summation in English. He is even more prolific in Chinese. Wang's command of the creative and critical literatures is unrivalled.Monster's subject is “the multivalence of Chinese violence across the past century”: not 1960s “structural violence” or postcolonial “epistemic violence,” but hunger, suicide, anomie, betrayal (though not assassination or incarceration), and “the violence of representation”: misery that reflects or creates monstrosity in history. Monster thus comments on “history and memory,” like Ban Wang's and Yomi Braester's recent efforts, although for historical reasons modern Chinese literature studies are allergic to historical and sociological methodologies.Monster is comparative, mixing diverse – sometimes little read – post-May Fourth and Cold War-era works with pieces from the 19th and 20th fins de siècle. Each chapter is a free associative rhapsody (sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious; often neo-Freudian), evoking, from a recurring minor detail as in new historicist criticism, a major binary trope or problematic for Wang to “collapse” or blur. His forte is making connections between works. The findings: (1) decapitation (loss of a “head,” or guiding consciousness?) in Chinese fiction betokens remembering or “re-membering” (of the severed), as in an unfinished Qing novel depicting beheaded Boxers, works by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, and Wuhe's 2000 commemoration of a 1930 Taiwanese aboriginal uprising; (2) justice is poetic, but equals punishment, even crime, in late Qing castigatory novels, Bai Wei, and several Maoist writers; (3) in revolutionary literature, love and revolution blur, as do love affairs in life with those in fiction; (4) hunger, indistinct from anorexia, is excess; witness “starved” heroines of Lu Xun, Lu Ling, Eileen Chang and Chen Yingzhen; (5) remembering scars creates scars, as in socialist realism, Taiwan's anticommunist fiction, and post-Mao scar literature; (6) in fiction about evil (late Ming and late Qing novels; Jiang Gui), inhumanity is all too human and sex blurs with politics; (7) suicide can be a poet's immortality, from Wang Guowei to Gu Cheng; (8) cultural China's most creative new works invoke ghosts again, obscuring lines between the human, the “real,” and the spectral.

scholarly journals Translation Policy, Social System, and Ideology: A Study on the English Translation of Modern Chinese Fiction for America During the CWRAJ

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110469
Author(s):  
Ping Li ◽  
Chuanmao Tian
Keyword(s):  
Social System ◽  
Chinese Government ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
The Us ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
Us Government ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Modern Chinese Fiction ◽  
War Of Resistance

This article explores translation policy on the English translations of modern Chinese fiction to American readers during China’s War of Resistance against Japan (1931–1945). The research findings show that translation policy may not be explicitly stated, but implicitly embodied in some political, diplomatic, and cultural policies made by the American and Chinese governments. Translation policy making as a social system is influenced by the political environment during the war. Different policy makers’ motives and policies change over time in reaction to each other with the course of the war, and the changing socio-political climate in China and the US had great effects on the English translations of Chinese fiction before the entry of the US into the war and after the US government became actively involved in translation projects. Moreover, the ideological preferences and political interests of the various actors shape actual translation practice—the selection of texts and actual choices in wording. This course of events affects the reception of these translations by the US public. In other words, the readership of these books grew after the Chinese government became allies in the war with the American government.

scholarly journals Gender and Superstition in Modern Chinese Literature

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 588
Author(s):  
Gal Gvili
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Literary Methods ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Modern Era

This article offers a new perspective on the study of the discourse on superstition (mixin) in modern China. Drawing upon recent work on the import of the concept “superstition” to the colonial world during the 19th century, the article intervenes in the current study of the circulation of discursive constructs in area studies. This intervention is done in two ways: first, I identify how in the modern era missionaries and Western empires collaborated in linking anti-superstition thought to discourses on women’s liberation. Couched in promises of civilizational progress to cultures who free their women from backward superstitions, this historical connection between empire, gender and modern knowledge urges us to reorient our understanding of superstition merely as the ultimate other of “religion” or “science.” Second, in order to explore the nuances of the connection between gender and superstition, I turn to an archive that is currently understudied in the research on superstition in China. I propose that we mine modern Chinese literature by using literary methods. I demonstrate this proposal by reading China’s first feminist manifesto, The Women’s Bell by Jin Tianhe and the short story Medicine by Lu Xun.

scholarly journals Seeking Christian Theology in Modern Chinese Fiction: An Exercise for Sino-Christian Theology

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper
Keyword(s):  
Christian Theology ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Chinese People ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
Modern Chinese Fiction

The development of Christian theology in contemporary China can learn much from Chinese fiction beginning with Lu Xun and his dedication to writing for the spirit of the Chinese people. Increasingly, Chinese novelists have reflected the growth of spiritual life in the Chinese People’s Republic in spite of the burden placed on the Christian church and religious believers.

Learning to Read Lu Xun, 1918–1923: The Emergence of a Readership

2002 ◽  
Vol 172 ◽  
pp. 1042-1064 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Shan Chou
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Fourth Generation ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
The Creation ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
New Literature

As the first and still the most prominent writer in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun (1881–1936) had been the object of extensive attention since well before his death. Little noticed, however, is the anomaly that almost nothing was written about Lu Xun in the first five years of his writing career – only eleven items date from the years 1918–23. This article proposes that the five-year lag shows that time was required to learn to read his fiction, a task that necessitated interpretation by insiders, and that further time was required for the creation of a literary world that would respond in the form of published comments. Such an account of the development of his standing has larger applicability to issues relating to the emergence of a modern readership for the New Literature of the May Fourth generation, and it draws attention to the earliest years of that literature. Lu Xun's case represents the earliest instance of a fast-evolving relationship being created between writers and their society in those years.

“A Story about Hair”: A Curious Mirror of Lu Xun's Pre-Republican Years

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Shan Chou
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Iconic Figure

This article examines the subject of queues in the life and writings of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the most prominent figure in modern Chinese literature. The long-standing reluctance of readers and critics to associate this backward hairstyle with Lu Xun's iconic figure has restricted our understanding of the topic to two well-known satirical portraits in his short fiction, Ah Q and Sevenpounder. This article, however, proposes that the queue is of more than satiric interest—that the author's own experience raises fundamental questions about how he discloses and transmutes certain experiences in his writings. Starting from some little-studied events featuring queues in his pre-Republican years and a puzzling short story that recounts them, this essay analyzes the queue's autobiographical connections and their varied literary manifestations. It also makes a case for reexamining the uses of autobiography for a writer whose life story is an important part of his influence.

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