Imagining Mass Dictatorships ― The Individual and the Masses in Literature and Cinema

This volume in the series 'Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century' sees twelve Swedish, Korean and Japanese scholars, theorists, and historians of fiction and non-fiction probe the literary subject of life in 20th century mass dictatorships. Generously defined, the 'literary' in this context covers a wide spectrum of narrative forms, ranging from the commercial television documentary to popular crime fiction, and from digitally restored amateur film on DVD to the Nobel Prize winning novel. It deals with mass dictatorship regimes as far apart as Nazi Germany, Park Chung-hee's South Korea, Stalinist Russia, post-war Hungary, Mao Zedong's China, apartheid's South Africa, and Ceausescu's Romania. The interplay of analytical ideas and the transnational perspectives that this volume brings add a new dimension to our understanding of traumatic events – 'dark chapters' – in 20th century history. By focusing the immense role of imagination within a cultural discourse otherwise dominated by irrefutable facts such as the existence of Holocaust and Gulag, this volume opens new ways of thinking perceptively about trauma, power and self.

Michael Schoenhals is Professor of Chinese at Lund University, Sweden. He was a contributor to previous volumes in the Mass Dictatorship series, and a co-editor of the volume entitled Mass Dictatorship and Modernity. He has published extensively on society and politics in the People's Republic of China, including Mao's Last Revolution (2006; co-authored by Roderick MacFarquhar), a major history of the Cultural Revolution. His most recent book entitled Spying for the People: Mao's Secret Agents, 1949–1967 (2014) tells the story of domestic agent and operational work by Mao's state security organs at the height of the Cold War.

Karin Sarsenov is Associate Professor in Russian Studies at Malmo University, Sweden. She has published extensively on Russian women's literature, including a monograph and a co-edited volume on Nina Sadur. She has conducted projects on women's autobiography, representations of Russian marital migration in literature and film and the Russian literature curriculum.