The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature is an anthology of Chinese literature edited by Yunte Huang and published in 2016 by W. W. Norton & Company. Huang, a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, [1] described the book as a "search for the soul of modern China" in the introduction. [2]
The book is 600 pages long and has works spanning about 100 years until its publishing date, with almost 50 authors represented. [3] The works were translated by multiple people. [1]
The works were placed in three sections: the Republican Era which spans from 1911 to 1949 and includes works from the New Culture Movement; the Revolutionary Era, spanning 1949 to 1976; and the Post-Mao Era, which has works since 1976. The portions of the book post 1990 are heavily focused on poetry and have less emphasis on urban fiction. [1]
Pre-1949 works: [1]
Julia Lovell of The New York Times wrote that "it’s heartening to see a serious publisher, one whose list is geared to the general reader, invest in an anthology that manages to combine the established canon with less-well-known selections." [1] She argued that the book should have included works by Eileen Chang, and that male writers were represented too heavily in this anthology of modern Chinese writing. [1]
Lu Xun, born Zhou Zhangshou, was a Chinese writer, literary critic, lecturer, and state servant. He was a leading figure of modern Chinese literature. Writing in vernacular and Literary Chinese, he was a short story writer, editor, translator, literary critic, essayist, poet, and designer. In the 1930s, he became the titular head of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai during republican-era China (1912–1949).
Eileen Chang (traditional Chinese: 張愛玲; simplified Chinese: 张爱玲; pinyin: Zhāng Àilíng; Wade–Giles: Chang1 Ai4-ling2；September 30, 1920 – September 8, 1995), also known as Chang Ai-ling or Zhang Ailing, or by her pen name Liang Jing (梁京), was a Chinese-born American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter.
The history of Chinese literature extends thousands of years, and begins with the earliest recorded inscriptions, court archives, building to the major works of philosophy and history written during the Axial Age. The Han and Tang dynasties were considered golden ages of poetry, while the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1271–1368) were notable for their lyrics (ci), essays, dramas, and plays. During the Ming and Qing, mature novels were written in written vernacular Chinese, an evolution from the preeminence of Literary Chinese patterned off the language of the Chinese classics. The introduction of widespread woodblock printing during the Tang and the invention of movable type printing by Bi Sheng (990–1051) during the Song rapidly spread written knowledge throughout China. Around the turn of the 20th century, the author Lu Xun (1881–1936) is considered an influential voice of vernacular Chinese literature.
Chinese poetry is poetry written, spoken, or chanted in the Chinese language, and a part of the Chinese literature. While this last term comprises Classical Chinese, Standard Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Yue Chinese, and other historical and vernacular forms of the language, its poetry generally falls into one of two primary types, Classical Chinese poetry and Modern Chinese poetry.
The Classic of Poetry, also Shijing or Shih-ching, translated variously as the Book of Songs, Book of Odes, or simply known as the Odes or Poetry, is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, comprising 305 works dating from the 11th to 7th centuries BC. It is one of the "Five Classics" traditionally said to have been compiled by Confucius, and has been studied and memorized by scholars in China and neighboring countries over two millennia. It is also a rich source of chengyu that are still a part of learned discourse and even everyday language in modern Chinese. Since the Qing dynasty, its rhyme patterns have also been analysed in the study of Old Chinese phonology.
Guo Moruo, courtesy name Dingtang (鼎堂), was a Chinese author, poet, historian, archaeologist, and government official.
Xu Dishan was a Chinese author, translator and folklorist. He received his education in China, the United States, Britain, and India; while in school, he studied diverse topics in religion, philosophy, and literature. Upon his return to China, he was an active member of the May Fourth Movement, and published literary journals with his academic peers. He wrote a plethora of academic and fictitious works during his life, many of which he published under the pen name Luo Huasheng. He was best known for his short stories that focus on the people from the southern provinces of China and Southeast Asia. The protagonists of his stories were often women. Xu Dishan was a strong proponent of the Latinization Movement and believed that writing Chinese with a phonetic alphabet would greatly increase literacy. He died at age 47 from a heart attack.
Taiwanese literature refers to the literature written by Taiwanese in any language ever used in Taiwan, including Japanese, Taiwanese Han and Austronesian languages.
Red Star Over China is a 1937 book by Edgar Snow. It is an account of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that was written when it was a guerrilla army and still obscure to Westerners. Along with Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth (1931), it was the most influential book on Western understanding of China as well as the most influential book on Western sympathy for Red China in the 1930s.
David Der-wei Wang is a literary historian, critic, and the Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. He has written extensively on post-late Qing Chinese fiction, comparative literary theory, colonial and modern Taiwanese literature, diasporic literature, Chinese Malay literature, Sinophone literature, and Chinese intellectuals and artists in the 20th century. His notions such as "repressed modernities", "post-loyalism", and "modern lyrical tradition" are instrumental and widely discussed in the field of Chinese literary studies.
Willis Barnstone is an American poet, religious scholar, and translator. He was born in Lewiston, Maine and lives in Oakland, California. He has translated works by Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pedro Salinas, Pablo Neruda, and Wang Wei, as well as the New Testament and fragments by Sappho and pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος).
People's Literature is the oldest continuously published literary magazine in China, and the first literary magazine published in Communist China. Established in 1949, the magazine is published by the People's Literature Publishing House and issued by the Chinese Writers Association. Its head office is located at 166 Chaonei Ave, Beijing. Its current director is Pan Kaixiong (潘凯雄) and its current editor-in-chief is Guan Shiguang (管士光).
Hualing Nieh Engle, née Nieh Hua-ling, is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She is a professor emerita at the University of Iowa.
Frank Dikötter is a Dutch historian who specialises in modern China. Dikötter has been Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006. Prior to that, he taught modern Chinese history at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He holds an honorary doctorate from Leiden University and is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
Modern Chinese poetry, including New poetry, refers to post Qing dynasty Chinese poetry, including the modern vernacular (baihua) style of poetry increasingly common with the New Culture and 4 May 1919 movements, with the development of experimental styles such as "free verse" ; but, also including twentieth and twenty-first century continuations or revivals of Classical Chinese poetry forms. Some modern Chinese poetry represents major new and modern developments in the poetry of one of the world's larger areas, as well as other important areas sharing this linguistic affinity. One of the first poets and theorist in the modern Chinese poetry mode was Hu Shih (1891–1962).
Ming poetry refers to the poetry of or typical of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). With over one million specimens of Ming poetry surviving today, the poetry of the Ming dynasty represents one of the major periods of Classical Chinese poetry, as well as an area of active modern academic research. Ming poetry is marked by 2 transitional phases, the transition between the Yuan dynasty which was the predecessor to the Ming, and the Qing-Ming transition which eventually resulted in the succeeding Qing dynasty. Although in politico-dynastic terms, the dynastic leadership of China is historically relatively clear-cut, the poetic periods involved encompass the lifespans and works of poets whose lives and poetic output transcend both the end of one dynasty and the initiatory period of the next.
Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry is an anthology of around 1,000 Chinese poems translated into English, edited by Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo and published in 1975 by Anchor Press/Doubleday. Wu-chi Liu served as the anthology's senior editor. As of 2002, the book had been widely used in Asian literature studies. In 2002 Stacy Finz of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that the book "was a best-seller".
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature is a 1995 anthology of Chinese literature edited by Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt and published by Columbia University. Its intended use is to be a textbook.
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama is a 2010 book edited and introduced by Xiaomei Chen and published by the Columbia University Press.
Despite a long-held belief in pre-modern China that women lacked literary talent, women's works – particularly poetry – did win a degree of respect within Chinese literature during the Imperial period. During the first half of the 20th century, writing by women reflected feminist ideas and the political upheavals of the time. Women writers conveyed expression from a feminine perspective, as opposed to man writers who conveyed expressions from a masculine perspective.
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