Tradition and Hybridity in Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Rosenmeier
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The Real ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Shi Zhecun ◽  
Mu Shiying

This chapter focuses on the 1930s New Sensationist (xinganjuepai) writers Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, whose works are shown in later chapters to have influenced the subsequent literary scene. They are seen here as an avant-garde group that wrote works in opposition to the overall direction of the contemporary literary field. Through close analysis of a number of short stories, the chapter demonstrates how these authors constructed hybrid works that incorporated tropes and stereotypes from popular literature, legend, tradition, literature and myth. By combining the real with the otherworldly and the imagined, these authors rejected realism and the politicisation of literature promoted at the time by the League of Left-wing Writers. The chapter also establishes aspects of these writers’ works that are used for later comparison.

Boundaries of the Real in Xu Xu’s Fiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Rosenmeier
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Abnormal Psychology ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Status ◽  
Shi Zhecun

This chapter focuses on Xu Xu’s fiction from the 1930s and 40s, providing analyses of his main short stories and novels from this period, demonstrating how Xu’s work transitioned from modernist experimentation to popular romances after his return from studies in France. Xu’s bestselling short stories and novels were often set abroad and featured exotic, otherworldly characters, such as ghosts, spies, pirates and gypsies. In many of these works, the cosmopolitan, rational and educated male protagonist encounters a mysterious, elusive, otherworldly woman. Eventually, the truth is revealed and the mysteries are uncovered, vindicating the modern outlook of the male narrator. With their references to traditional literature, abnormal psychology and sexual desire, such works frequently echo Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying’s writings from a decade earlier, yet Xu’s writings are mainly escapist entertainment rather than an attack on rational modernity or the status of art in society.

On the Margins of Modernism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Rosenmeier
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Extensive Study ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Chinese Writing

Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Despite being an integral part of the Chinese literary scene, their bestselling fiction has, however, been given scant attention in histories of Chinese writing. This book is the first extensive study of Xu Xu and Wumingshi in English or any other Western language and it re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940s. Their romantic novels and short stories were often set abroad and featured a wide range of stereotypes, from pirates, spies and patriotic soldiers to ghosts, spirits and exotic women who confounded the mostly cosmopolitan male protagonists. Christopher Rosenmeier’s detailed analysis of these popular novels and short stories shows that such romances broke new ground by incorporating and adapting narrative techniques and themes from the Shanghai modernist writers of the 1930s, notably Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying. The study thereby contests the view that modernism had little lasting impact on Chinese fiction, and it demonstrates that the popular literature of the 1940s was more innovative than usually imagined, with authors, such as those studied here, successfully crossing the boundaries between the popular and the elite, as well as between romanticism and modernism, in their bestselling works.

Ästhetisch konstruierte Traditionen?

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 442-470
Author(s):  
Torsten Voß
Keyword(s):  
Discursive Practice ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Concept Of Beauty

Abstract Throughout various literary and artistic periods, artists have referred to or even converted to Catholicism as a means of conjuring a certain perception of a European tradition. In doing this, they seek to create an aesthetic of romanticism and/or an idea and concept of beauty, the artist, artwork etc. After giving a brief overview of this discursive practice in modern avant-garde movements, this article focuses on early forms of literary Catholic movements, such as the French Renouveau catholique and François-René de Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity), as well as Novalis’ ‘invention’ of German romanticism in his essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe). It shows that there are a variety of parallels to be identified across these periods and places, namely, in programs, performances, rhetoric-building and group-building processes, and in cultivating an anti-bourgeois distinction, both in the texts themselves and in the positioning of the artists within the literary field. Despite accusations of being reactionary, writers and artists who elaborate a Catholic concept of art and literature aim to develop a traditionalist and anti-modern stance within (aesthetical and social) modernity.

scholarly journals SPLIT ENDS? LITERATURE AND POLITICS AT THEFIN DE SIECLE

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 697-709
Author(s):  
Jock Macleod
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
The Real ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Split Ends ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Long Course

AS AN UNDERGRADUATE IN THE1970s, my introduction to the 1890s was perfunctory. Squeezed into a couple of weeks in the middle of a year-long course on “Victorian and Modern Literature,” the literature of the decade was reduced to aestheticism and decadence and presented as something of a preliminary to the real business of modernism. Such a focus reflected the scholarship of the time, in which thefin de sièclewas constructed as a moment of transition, one in which the political and socio-ethical dimensions so central to high Victorian literature were evacuated, as arguments for the autonomy of art came to dominate the literary cultural landscape. The organising principle was one of bifurcation: the separating out ofavant gardefrom bourgeois culture, the high from the low and, of particular relevance to this essay, literature from politics.

The Political Function of Domestic Objects in the Fiction of Aleksandra Kollontai

Slavic Review ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgitta Ingemanson
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
The Real ◽  
Political Function ◽  
The Status ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Status Of Women

During the winter of 1922-1923 when she was just beginning her diplomatic career, Bolshevik activist Aleksandra Kollontai wrote two novels and several short stories that were immediately published in Russia and subsequently combined into two volumes under the titles Liubov’ pchel trudovykh and Zhenshchina na perelome. They were dismissed as mere autobiographical romances, indulging in unhealthy introspection and dangerously divorced from the “real” demands of society. At a time when Soviet Russia was facing enormous challenges connected with the reconstruction after the civil war and with the partial return to a market economy under the New Economic Policy (NEP), Kollontai's focus on domestic relationships and the status of women seemed narrow and excessively private.

OBERIU and the Conversations of the Lipavsky Circle

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene Ostashevsky
Keyword(s):  
Social Aspects ◽  
Embodied Knowledge ◽  
The Real ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Circle Of Friends ◽  
Daniil Kharms

This article distinguishes the avant-garde group OBERIU and its predecessors, led by the poets Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, and Nikolai Zabolotsky and performing openly in Leningrad between 1925 and 1930, from the informal circle of the 1930s, which also included the poet Nikolai Oleinikov and the philosophers Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin. Prevented from making their writings public, in 1933–1934 members of this underground circle of friends documented their interactions in Lipavsky’s Conversations. A history of the two overlapping groups, emphasizing their social aspects, is followed by a synopsis of the philosophy of the circle. The article argues that the montage-based composition paradigms of the avant-garde, replacing determinism, causality, and rationality with contiguity and the non sequitur, are reflected in Kharmsian play with numbers and in his concept of the “real,” as well as in the phenomenological methods of Druskin and Lipavsky, which seek perspectival, qualitative, and embodied knowledge that science cannot grant.

Free Form

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Dufourmantelle
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Free Form ◽  
The Real

We recognize gentleness in the literary figures that turned everything around them upside down without meaning to, including Prince Myshkin, the majority of characters in Kafka, in Melville, in the short stories of Tolstoy, little John Mohune in Moonfleet. These characters arrive from nowhere and with gentleness provoke violence and passion around them. They polarize the real around an unprecedented truth that is impossible to bear. An excess of this gentleness is dangerous because it reveals faults, desire, manipulation, or conversely, goodness.

Banlieue Writers: the Struggle for Literary Recognition Through Collective Mobilization

2018 ◽  
pp. 44-59
Author(s):  
Kaoutar Harchi ◽  
Jenny Money ◽  
Kathryn Kleppinger ◽  
Laura Reeck
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Social Categorization ◽  
Immigrant Parents ◽  
Diverse Populations ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Artistic Value ◽  
Subjective Meanings

This chapter focuses on processes of social categorization used in the French literary field to define authors born in France to postcolonial immigrant parents. In 2007, the collective 'Qui fait la France?' released a volume of short stories called Chroniques d’une société annoncée, prefaced by its manifesto that was also released to the popular press. Composed of authors self-identifying as having 'mixed identities', the collective aimed through the publication of their manifesto and short stories to transform French literature through narrating and recognizing the unique histories, suffering, and aspirations of ethnically diverse populations. Meanwhile, its reception demonstrated how judgments of artistic value for cultural production by French artists of postcolonial immigrant heritage reveal problems tied to the conditions, modalities, and process of categorizing literary production. Through a sociological reconstruction of the formal and subjective meanings that each individual (artist, journalist, publisher, producer, etc.) ascribes to his/her actions, this chapter exposes the various logics through which artistic labelling based on social criteria establishes hierarchies and categories that structure the French literary field.

Fictional German governesses in Edwardian popular culture: English responses to German militarism and modernity

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Bayley
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
Selection Of

Historians have tended to focus on propaganda when assessing Edwardian attitudes towards Germans, but a shift of focus to fiction reveals a rather different picture. Whereas propaganda created the cliché of ‘the Hun’, fiction produced non- and even counter-stereotypical figures of Germans. An analysis of German governess characters in a selection of short stories, performances, novels, and cartoons indicates that the Edwardian image of Germans was not purely negative but ambivalent and multifarious. Imagined German governesses appeared as patriots and spies, pacifists and warmongers, spinsters and seducers, victims and evil-doers. A close look at characterisations by Saki [H. H. Munro], M. E. Francis [Margaret Blundell], Dorothy Richardson, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Frank Hart and others reveals not only their variety but also their metaphorical use as responses to Germany’s aggressive militarism and avant-garde modernity. Each governess figure conveyed a positive, negative or ambivalent message about the potential impact of German militarism and modernity on England and Englishness. The aggregate image of German governesses, and by inference Germans, was therefore equivocal and demonstrates the mixed feelings of Edwardians toward their ‘cousin’ country.

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