1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910168746503321

Autore

Huters Theodore

Titolo

Bringing the World Home : Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China / / Theodore Huters

Pubbl/distr/stampa

University of Hawai'i Press, 2005

Honolulu : , : University of Hawai'i Press, , 2005

©2005

ISBN

0-8248-7401-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (364 p.)

Disciplina

895.1/09005

Soggetti

Chinese literature - 20th century - Western influences

Chinese literature - 20th century - History and criticism

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 335-361) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. China as Origin -- Chapter 2. Appropriations: Another Look at Yan Fu and Western Ideas -- Chapter 3. New Ways of Writing -- Chapter 4. New Theories of the Novel -- Chapter 5. Wu Jianren: Engaging the World -- Chapter 6. Melding East and West: Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone -- Chapter 7. Impossible Representations: Visions of China and the West in Flower in a Sea of Retribution -- Chapter 8. The Contest over Universal Values -- Chapter 9. Swimming against the Tide: The Shanghai of Zhu Shouju -- Chapter 10. Lu Xun and the Crisis of Figuration -- Afterword -- Notes -- Glossary -- Works Cited -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Bringing the World Home sheds new light on China’s vibrant cultural life between 1895 and 1919—a crucial period that marks a watershed between the conservative old regime and the ostensibly iconoclastic New Culture of the 1920s. Although generally overlooked in the effort to understand modern Chinese history, the era has much to teach us about cultural accommodation and is characterized by its own unique intellectual life. This original and probing work traces the most significant strands of the new post-1895 discourse, concentrating on the anxieties inherent in a complicated process of cultural transformation. It focuses principally on how the need to accommodate



the West was reflected in such landmark novels of the period as Wu Jianren’s Strange Events Eyewitnessed in the Past Twenty Years and Zhu Shouju’s Tides of the Huangpu, which began serial publication in Shanghai in 1916. The negative tone of these narratives contrasts sharply with the facile optimism that characterizes the many essays on the "New Novel" appearing in the popular press of the time. Neither iconoclasm nor the wholesale embrace of the new could square the contradicting intellectual demands imposed by the momentous alternatives presenting themselves.An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.