Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century (review)

This anthology of highly polished, previously published papers directly challenges the canonized status of China's twentieth-century works, authors, and audiences. McDougall presents a consistent, singularly harsh, but simultaneously subtle and convincing argument for a critical approach to modern Chinese literature that emphasizes the demystification of the process by which authors, their works, and the modern Chinese literary field in general are constructed. Refreshingly without recourse to literary-critical jargon, McDougall methodically reveals the politics of power and institution operating in symbiosis with self-censorship and Western sinological study to obscure truths about modern Chinese literature. She demonstrates that the resulting valorization of mediocre literary products and authors is a product of the Chinese intellectual's obsession with his own marginalization—his fall from privileged social status and power in a post-civil examination China. The construction of modern Chinese literature studies thus resulted in a "fictional [canonized] author" and an "imaginary [canonized] audience" that served to buttress the tenuous legitimacy of the very producers and consumers of the new literature since the May Fourth period. This theme provides the canvas that McDougall uses as she courageously interprets the broad-ranging issues in modern Chinese literature, including its fundamental validity and direction.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, "Authors, Audiences and Critics," examines "the role that critics and scholars in Western countries have played in the formation of the modern Chinese literary canon" (p. 8). Moreover, locating the idealization and dramatization of authors' lives in the continuum of the role of "intellectual" descendent of the literati of dynastic times, McDougall makes a significant contribution to the study of modern Chinese literature by redirecting C. T. Hsia's famous "obsession with China" to demonstrate that it was not the discourse of nationalism or internationalism (the fate of China) with which intellectuals and writers were primarily concerned, but, in fact, the fate of the intellectual and his privileged role in society. McDougall's second significant contribution to the field is in directly confronting the issue of the quality of modern Chinese literature. She unmasks the phenomenon of "inferior literary texts masquerading as modern masters" (p. 24). She implies that modern Chinese literary studies needs a massive reevaluation as a field, especially given the complicity of Western sinology in the construction of imagined authors and audiences. McDougall points out "how very little still is known about Chinese writers and readers, and how unreliable or untested much of the information that we have about them is" (p. 1).

Chapter 2, "Modern Chinese Literature and Its Critics," sets the scene for the latter parts of the book as McDougall systematically raises questions about the process of canonization from the May Fourth through the post-Cultural Revolution periods. She argues that canonization has not been well studied, and notes that both intended and actual audiences have been ignored. Moreover, by treating literary texts as social science documents that provide a window into the "public and private consciousness" of authors and readers, Western scholarship has been complicit in canonization by taking for granted and valorizing the "official literature." This discourse of canonization directly influences the reception of modern Chinese literature inside and outside China, and has been counterproductive to the field as a whole: "For contemporary Chinese writers, however, the lack of an enthusiastic Western response has been deeply disappointing. Since May Fourth, Chinese writers have seen themselves as contributing to world literature, and to be disregarded in this way undermines the internationalism that they strive for" (p. 37). McDougall's demystification of this century-long cycle of inbred, mutually self-invested writing and critique, moreover, demonstrates "the huge conceptual gap between Western critical methodologies and non-Western literary texts" (p. 30). She brilliantly suggests that modern Chinese literature holds the potential for advances in world literary understanding by demonstrating the necessity to "adapt Western literary theories to deal with...