Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na'ou's Urban Shanghai Landscape

1996 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 934-956 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shu-Mei Shih
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Chinese Education ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Urban Writing ◽  
Liu Na'ou

In 1924 a half-Taiwanese, half-Japanese man travelled from Japan to Shanghai to study French at the Jesuit Université L'Aurore. He was young, flamboyant, and rich, and eventually used his own personal funds to found two bookstores and three journals in Shanghai. Despite his ambiguous national identity and lack of formal Chinese education, he also became the founder of a Chinese modernist literary movement called new sensationism (xinganjue pai), earned substantial notoriety, and attracted a host of followers. Murdered by an unidentified assassin in 1939, in his shorr life Liu Na'ou (1900–39) mirrored the literary movement that he created and that died with him. But this was not before he had published an intriguing collection of short stories entitled Scène (his own French title, 1930a), which was in some measure to define what urban writing meant for Chinese writers in Shanghai during the Nanjing decade (1927–37), as the quotation above suggests.

‘The sweet tang of rape’: Torture, survival and masculinity in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Adams
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Literary Meaning ◽  
Second World ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the torture scenes in Ian Fleming’s canon of Bond novels and short stories (1953–1966), despite the fact that they represent some of the most potent sites of the negotiations of masculinity, nationhood, violence and the body for which Fleming’s texts are critically renowned. This article is an intersectional feminist reading of Fleming’s canon, which stresses the interpenetrations of homophobia, anticommunism and misogyny that are present in Fleming’s representation of torture. Drawing on close readings of Fleming’s novels and theoretical discussions of heteronormativity, homophobia and national identity, this article argues that Fleming’s representations of torture are sites of literary meaning in which the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity are policed and reinforced. This policing is achieved, this article argues, through the associations of the perpetration of torture with homosexuality and Communism, and the survival of torture with post-imperial British hegemonic masculinity. Fleming’s torture scenes frequently represent set pieces in which Bond must reject or endure the unsolicited intimacy of other men; he must resist their seductions and persuasions and remain ideologically undefiled. Bond’s survival of torture is a metonymy for Britain’s survival of post-Second World War social and political upheaval. Further, the horror of torture, for Fleming, is the horror of a hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity in disarray: Bond’s survival represents the regrounding of normative heterosexual masculinity through the rejection of homosexuality and Communism.

Who Is a Muslim?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Wasif Khan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Core ◽  
The North ◽  
Urdu Literature ◽  
Oriental Tale

Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant forms in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question—who is a Muslim—is predominant in eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief amongst them, but takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the modern Urdu literary formation, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate on the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship, first in colonial India and subsequently in contemporary Pakistan.

Angāre and the Founding of the Progressive Writers' Association

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shabana Mahmud
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Major Change ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Urdu Literature ◽  
Major Turning Point ◽  
History Of

The book Angāre, a collection of ten short stories by Sajjād Ẓahīr, Rashīd Jahān, Aḥmed 'Alī and Maḥmūduzẓafar published in Lucknow in December 1932, marks a major turning point in the history of Urdu literature. Acting as a powerful catalyst, it initiated a major change in the form and content of Urdu literature and helped to lay the basis for the establishment of the Progressive Writers Association, the most significant Urdu literary movement of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals “Mermaids” Theme in A. P. Chekhov’s Short Stories «Trouble» and “Nervous Breakdown”

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-17
Author(s):  
Anna A. Zubanova ◽  
Marina Ch. Larionova
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Psychological Issues ◽  
First Case ◽  
Nervous Breakdown

Short stories «Trouble» and «Nervous Breakdown» have social and psychological issues. However, as it often happens in A.P. Chekhov’s works, it is realized with the involvement of a folk culture language with which it creates the basis for its national identity. A folklore image of a mermaid and concepts related to it have an important role in these realistic short stories. The image, being constructive in both cases, appears in different forms and performs different functions. In the first case, the mermaid creates an associated field of indifference, devastation. In the second – temptation, fall, seduction.

scholarly journals „Nostalgia” i inne opowiadania Nadieżdy Teffi, czyli Rosjanie w Paryżu lat 20. XX wieku

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-34
Author(s):  
Nel Bielniak
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity

In her humorous 1920s short stories Teffi shows the dramatic situation of Russian diaspora in Paris mainly through the prism of ordinary emigrants. The writer pays attention, among others, to such issues connected with the life of refugees as isolation, alienation, poverty, prurient nostalgia or national identity.

scholarly journals Love Fiction in China in the Second Decade of the 20 th Century: from Sentiments to Duck-Lovebirds and Butterflies

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103
Author(s):  
Natalia V. Zakharova
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Previous Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
History Of

The article analyzes the evolution of Chinese love fiction in the first years that followed the 1911 Xinhai revolution. The article focuses on literature representing “couples in love,” namely fiction about “duck-lovebirds and butterflies,” an invariant of the “love prose” genre. The authors of these works both continued the traditions of the previous literature and at the same time attempted at modernizing the genre. Chinese literary scholars have controversial opinions about this genre and its invariants. Controversies concern the literary movement to which these works should be attributed, and the place of the genre in the history of Chinese literature. The founder of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xin, gave a negative assessment of this genre. Modern critics agree that fiction about “duck-lovebirds and butterflies” has poor aesthetic merits yet they also argue that the authors “created an objective picture of reality, expressed different views and opinions.” By the 1920s, the vogue for writing novels and short stories in the style of “duck-lovebirds and butterflies” had waned. This genre however gained a new surge in popularity in the mid-1940s thanks to Zhang Eileen who modernized Chinese love fiction.

Fantastic Literature - a Medium of Modernity: Svetoslav Minkov

Proglas ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolina Burneva ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Fantastic Literature ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
European Context ◽  
The Aesthetic

The article introduces the reader to the context of the momentous transformations of the aesthetic and worldview paradigms at the end of ‘the long 19th century’ and the arrival of modernity in Bulgarian culture which had – until then – been traditional and folklore-based. In this context, the author traces the early work of Svetoslav Minkov – a distinguished author of fantastic literature and cofounder of Bulgarian diabolical literature. The article focuses on comparative reading of several short stories by Gustav Meyrink and Svetoslav Minkov in order to highlight the arguments supporting the discussion of this literary movement in a broad, European context.

scholarly journals THE CRISIS OF MASCULINITY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN GEORGI STAMATOV’S SHORT STORIES

2020 ◽  
pp. 101-109
Author(s):  
Marijana BIJELIC
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Social Success ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
The Social ◽  
Crisis Of Masculinity ◽  
And Gender

This work analyzes the crisis of masculinity in terms of modernization, the change in the relation between the sexes, as well as the crisis of national identity in Georgi Stamatov’s short stories from the perspective of contemporary theoretical works on nationalism and gender, especially masculinity. His male antiheroes sense that traditional values and norms are no longer valid in contemporary Bulgaria and feel nostalgic for the lost masculine and national identity. They all have the feeling that they cannot rely on old norms and values and are trying to find a way out of the crisis. The female characters and feminized topoi of Bulgaria and its capital Sofia usually evoke interpretations connected to the concept of infidelity, which causes an identity crisis in the modern man: while traditional but weak characters Abarov and Malkov are trying to remain faithful, although they have been betrayed by the “new Bulgaria”, “new Sofia” and unfaithful female characters, Viryanov as a modern male achieves an enormous social success by using women in order to climb up the social ladder and betrays Bulgaria with his leaving for Paris, which represents the center of the demonized western modernism.

Bahrain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Michalak-Pikulska ◽  
Waïl S. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Press

This chapter examines the development of the novel in Bahrain. It first provides an overview of the beginnings of the literary movement in Bahrain, noting the role played by the press in the development of modern Bahraini literature, particularly prose genres. It then looks at the first generation of Bahraini authors, including Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Malik, who began publishing short stories in 1966, and ‘Abd Allah Khalīfa, whose early fiction contains realistic representations of life centered on the sea. The chapter also discusses a number of Bahraini novels written by the second generation of Bahraini authors, including Walīd Hāshim, Fatḥiyya Nā ṣir, and Aḥmad al-Mu’adhdhin.

scholarly journals Manufacturing Authenticity: The Cultural Production of National Identities in Singapore

2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 877-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
TERENCE CHONG
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The State ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Confucian Ethics ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Difference

AbstractAccording to Prasenjit Duara, the sacredness of the nation hinges on its ‘regimes of authenticity’ where timelessness and the politics of embodiment are key to an authentic national identity. This paper looks at three different cultural impulses that have attempted to manufacture authenticity in Singapore. They are: the Malay literary movementAngkatan Sasterawan 50prior to independence; the state-sponsored Confucian ethics discourse during the 1980s; and the romanticization of the working-class ‘heartlander’ through contemporary popular culture in confrontation with the politics of global capitalism and globalization. In doing so, this paper articulates the difference between the regimes of authenticity of state elites and non-state cultural producers, as well as their ‘national imaginaries’. It concludes that the regime of authenticity, that operationalizes the representations of the working class as a diametric opposite to the logic and force of globalization, offers the most popular symbols of national identity in Singapore.

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