The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature

More than fifty short essays centered on specific writers and literary trends create an engaging and easily digestible history of Chinese literature from the Qing period (1895-1911) to today. The essays in this volume can be read sequentially for a chronological account or separately in conjunction with reading the literary works in Chinese or English-language translation. Each entry features author names and titles, as well as key terms and references, in English and in Chinese characters for readers who know or are learning Chinese, and each concludes with a bibliography of relevant primary and secondary sources.

The volume opens with eight thematic essays addressing general issues in the study of Chinese literature: the ethics of writing a literary history, the formation of the canon, the relationship between language and form, the influence of literary institutions and communities, the effects of censorship, and the role of different media on the development of literature. Subsequent essays focus on authors, their works, and their schools, with entries on Wang Anyi, Eileen Chang, Shen Congwen, Yu Dafu, Mao Dun, Xiao Hong, Yang Jiang, Ba Jin, Yan Lianke, Ding Ling, Liang Qichao, Lao She, Wang Shuo, Zhu Tianwen, Zhu Tianxin, Xi Xi, Gao Xingjian, Lu Xun, Mo Yan, and Qian Zhongshu. Woven throughout are more general pieces on late Qing fiction, popular entertainment fiction, martial arts fiction, experimental theater, post-Mao avant-garde poetry in China, post-martial law fiction from Taiwan, contemporary genre fiction from China, and recent Internet literature, among other topics. Both a teaching tool and a go-to research companion, this volume is a one-of-a-kind resource for mastering modern literature in the Chinese-speaking world.

Kirk A. Denton is professor of Chinese literature at The Ohio State University. He is the author ofThe Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling andExhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. He editedModern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945 and coeditedLiterary Societies of Republican China. He is editor of the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and manager of its website, the MCLC Resource Center (u.osu.edu/mclc).