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Copyrighted Material 1 General Introduction Yingjin Zhang This introduction constructs, in four steps, a general framework for approaching modern Chinese literature. First, it seeks to reenvision the boundaries of modern Chinese literature by broaching critical issues embedded in key designations of this evolving field over time. Second, it traces the processes whereby the institutionalization of modern Chinese literature has taken shape, particularly in North America. Third, it delineates the structure of this volume—A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature—and briefly summarizes its subsequent 29 chapters in relation to pertinent topics in English scholarship. Fourth, it identifies areas not adequately covered in the companion and tracks new research directions. Overall, this introduction is designed to review the his­ tory and state of the field of modern Chinese literature, which emerged as a discipline in the early 1950s and has experienced rapid expansion since the early 1990s. Modern Chinese Literature: Reenvisioning the Boundaries We begin with an examination of the term “modern Chinese literature” and its three composite keywords. The first keyword is “modern.” Unlike its European counter­ parts, China claims a short span of the “modern,” especially relative to its history of thousands of years. What we now understand as “modern Chinese literature” initially refers to “New Literature”COPYRIGHTED (xin wenxue), which arose inMATERIAL the New Cultural Movement (1917–1927), and the “new” here forms a sharp contrast to the “old”—either litera­ ture written in the old linguistic form of classical Chinese (wenyan) or a mixture of it with the modern vernacular (baihua) in traditional literary forms of fiction and prose (sanwen). “New Literature” is differentiated in this case from “old literature” and “popular literature” (tongsu wenxue), especially the type of “middlebrow” urban A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, First Edition. Edited by Yingjin Zhang. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 0002547150.indd 1 7/25/2015 12:52:57 PM 2 Yingjin Zhang romance known as “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” (yuanyang hudie) or “butterfly fiction” for short (T. Liu 1984). In the 1950s, “modern literature” (xiandai wenxue) gradually replaced “New Literature” when the former was recognized as a new discipline in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Since the mid‐1980s, “modern literature” also tends to subsume “early modern literature” (jindai wenxue), as scholars extend the boundary of modernity to late Qing literature (1840–1911). In the PRC, a related concept of “twentieth‐century Chinese literature” (ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue) is theorized to incorporate post‐1949 “contemporary literature” (dangdai wenxue), but its inability to encompass either the pre‐1900 late Qing decades or post‐2000 devel­ opments makes this new term less desirable than “modern Chinese literature.” In English scholarship, “modern Chinese literature” is a standard term that covers from the late Qing all the way to the present, rather than the PRC’s compromised term “modern and contemporary literature” (xiandaingdai wenxue). The second keyword is “Chinese.” As a linguistic designation, “Chinese” refers to Zhongwen or Hanyu (Chinese language), the script used by the majority Han people in China as well as overseas, despite the fact that many Chinese—Han or otherwise— may speak different dialects or languages, the latter in the case of ethnic minorities. The term “Chinese literature” used to refer to literature written in Chinese only, but more recently there is a tendency to include literature written in minority languages such as Tibetan, and “Chinese” in this sense becomes a broader ethnic–national desig­ nation whereby Hua or Zhonghua encompasses ethnic minorities as well as Han people in mainland China. However, as a geopolitical designation, the otherwise innocuous English term “Chinese literature” becomes problematic because its Chinese equivalent Zhongguo wenxue means “literature of the Chinese nation‐state”—carrying with it an implied privilege of guo (the nation‐state) that writers and scholars outside mainland China may find offensive. While PRC scholars sometimes resort to Huawen wenxue (literature written in Sinitic languages) or haiwai Huaren wenxue (literature by overseas Chinese) to cover Hong Kong literature, Taiwanese literature, Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature, and so on, people outside mainland China often prefer these geo­ politically distinct designations to the umbrella term “Chinese literature.” Such a politics of naming addresses questions of Chineseness (R. Chow 2000: 1–25) and the power geometries of center versus periphery in transnational or transregional con­ texts, and the most recent contender in this debate is the Sinophone or Huayu yuxi, a concept that intends to destabilize the entrenched habits of literary studies in the PRC, as well as China studies and diaspora studies in North America and elsewhere in the West (Shih 2007; Shih, Tsai, and Bernards 2013)—to which we shall return in the concluding section.1 The third keyword is “literature.” Although wen (writing) has long been theorized in traditional Chinese aesthetics (Owen 1992), wenxue is a new term imported from the West into modern China. As in Western literary taxonomy, Chinese literature is divided into major genres—fiction, poetry, drama, and prose essay. Contrary to traditional Chinese literature in which poetry reigned supreme, in modern Chinese literature, fiction quickly assumed a leadership position as it proved more effective than poetry in 0002547150.indd 2 7/25/2015 12:52:57 PM General Introduction 3 serving China’s urgent needs of cultural, social, and political reforms or revolutions. From “New Literature” to “modern Chinese literature,” literature largely includes only elite literature, whereas literature of other types (e.g., folk literature, popular literature) is routinely excluded from the modern literary canon. It is after the advent of new media in the 1990s that the elite monopoly of literary institutions becomes ineffectual, and Internet or Web literature has swiftly spread to cultivate tastes and values alternative or even oppositional to elite culture. As long as we keep in mind that “modern Chinese literature” designates diverse literary genres and types, ethnic origins, and geopolitical territories, there is no need to pluralize “literature.”2 As we shall see later, many issues broached in this brief examination of the three keywords that make up the term “modern Chinese literature” have received critical attention in literary scholarship—in Chinese as well as in English. Given the limited space, A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature cannot adequately represent Chinese scholarship, but it has commissioned prominent scholars in mainland China to share their views on select topics (e.g., Chen Jianhua, Chen Sihe, Chen Xiaoming, Tao Dongfeng, and Zha Mingjian), in addition to featuring many scholars who have published extensively in Chinese as well—for instance, Ping‐hui Liao (Liao Binghui), Michelle Yeh (Xi Mi), and Zhang Longxi. Although parallel developments in Chinese and English scholarship occurred in the late 1980s without trans‐Pacific coordination (e.g., rewriting literary history), since the 1990s there have been more exchanges between Chinese and English scholarship as scholars increasingly engage in bilingual research and sometimes participate in collaborative projects (Chen Sihe and Wang 2011). To better contextualize such exchanges and engagements, we now turn to a concise institutional history of modern Chinese literature in English scholarship before delineating individual chapters in this companion. The Institution of Literary Scholarship: Polemics and Paradigms This section divides the institutional history of modern Chinese literature in English scholarship into three parts—the founding moment (1951–1963), the initial growth (1960s–1980s), and the rapid expansion (the 1990s to the present). Again, the limited space does not allow for a comprehensive overview, and the following selective sam­ pling should be supplemented with my elaboration on literary modernity in English scholarship in Chapter 30 and Chen Sihe’s brief survey of Chinese scholarship in Chapter 29. The founding moment, 1951–1963: literary historiography In Chinese as in English scholarship, modern Chinese literature is a relatively new field, and its two founding acts transpired by coincidence in 1951: first, Wang Yao, a scholar of medieval Chinese literature, published the first volume of A Draft History of 0002547150.indd 3 7/25/2015 12:52:57 PM 4 Yingjin Zhang New Chinese Literature (Zhongguo xin wenxue shigao) in the PRC; second, C. T. Hsia (Xia Zhiqing), a PhD student in English literature at Yale University, was recruited to research on modern China. These two acts would yield drastically different results. In the PRC, modern Chinese literature was officially instituted as a new discipline, but literary historiography was subjected to strict ideological supervision (Y. Zhang 1994: 358–364). In response to official criticism of his “petty bourgeois” stance and his “purely objective” method of privileging art over politics in 1952, Wang Yao quickly revised his first volume and reissued it with his second volume in 1953. Still, he failed to keep up with the frenetic speed of political changes, and after a few more rounds of public criticism and self‐criticism, he saw his history removed from circulation in 1955 (Y. Zhang 2016) and
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