Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity

Button (modern Chinese studies, McGill U., Canada) examines China's expression of literary modernity beginning with Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q," and following with Marxist philosopher Cai Yi's aesthetic theory of the type and the image, and socialist realist novels like Yang Mo's Song of Youth and Luo Guangbin and Yan Yiyan's Red Crag. He argues that studying Chinese socialist literature reveals problems and issues about the study of modern Chinese literature in general, as well as how aesthetic ideology has shaped the modern humanities in China and the West and institutional practices of studying literature. He examines how study of literature through literary criticism, theory, and pedagogy takes form in twentieth-century Chinese literature and how Chinese literary realism developed in relation to modern philosophy and works by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Walt Whitman, and others. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Peter Button, Ph.D. (2000) in East Asian Literature, Cornell University, is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies at McGill University. He has published in Positions, Postcolonial Studies, and Philosophy East and West.