The Persistence of the Premodern

??? COHPAnATIST REVIEW ESSAYS YI-TSI MEI FEUERWERKER. Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant "Other" in Modern Chinese Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. xii + 321 pp. + KIRK DENTON. The Problematic ofSelfin Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). xiv + 324 pp. THE PERSISTENCE OFTHE PREMODERN The study ofmodem Chinese literature in the United States is scarcely a generation old. Until the 1970s, the subject had an inferior rank, paling beside the glories of die traditional Chinese canon. Even exceptions like Chow Tse-tsung's seminal 77ie May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (1960) or Merle Goldman's Literary Dissent in Communist China (1967) treated the period from a historian's or political scientist's viewpoint rather than from that ofa literary critic. The field's fortunes since then might be traced through the academic wanderings of Leo Lee, whose Romantic Generation ofModern Chinese Writers (1973) was one of the first purely literary studies of modern Chinese literature. Kai-yu Hsii's anthology of Twentieth-Century Chinese Poetry (1964) had appeared a decade earlier; and C. T. Hsia's provocative and pioneering A History ofModern Chinese Fiction (1961) opened the doors for the consideration ofmodem Chinese literature as a respectable subject. Yet, modem Chinese literature in the early seventies lacked "cachet," and Leo Lee left Princeton University in 1976, despite a creditable research record and excellent teaching credentials. For the next six years, at Indiana University, along with Irving Lo of Indiana and Joseph Lau of Wisconsin, Leo developed a vigorous publishing program in modern Chinese literature at Indiana University Press as part oftwo series: Chinese Literature in Translation and Studies in Chinese Literature and Society, numbering among its publications 7"Ae Execution of Mayor Yin by Chen Jo-hsi, translated by Nancy Ing and Howard Goldblatt (1978); Fortress Besieged by Ch'ien Chung-shu, translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan Mao (1979); 77ie FieldofLife andDeath and Tales ofHulan Riverby Hsiao Hung, translated by Goldblatt and Ellen Yeung (1979); The Drowning ofan Old Cat and Other Stories by Hwang Chun-ming, translated by Goldblatt ( 1 980); The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies in Modern Chinese Literature by Jaroslav Prusek (1980); Literature ofthe People's Republic ofChina, edited by Kai-yu Hsu (1980); The Wilderness by Ts'ao Yu, translated by Christopher Rand and Joseph Lau (1980); and the SelectedPoems ofAi Qing, edited by Eugene Eoyang (1982). Leo left Indiana in 1982, and after sojourns at the University of Chicago and UCLA, joined Harvard University in 1995. With Joseph Lau, he is a doyen in the study of modem and contemporary Chinese literature. Programs in the period have proliferated throughout the country; conferences on its various aspects and authors abound; books issue in profusion from university presses (monographs most notably from Stanford University Press; translations from the University ofHawaii Press). Not only has the study ofmodem Chinese literature come ofage, it now dominates the study ofChinese literature and claims most ofthe neophytes in the field. Two other developments helped to establish the viability ofthe study ofliterature ofthe modem period in China and enhanced its development: First, the emerVcH . 24 (2000): 157 REVIEW ESSAYS gence of Chinese writers in the post-Mao period—from Wang Meng, Gao Xiaosheng , Zhang Xianliang, and Zhang Jie to Bei Dao, Su Qing, Liu Sola, and Gu Hua; and second, the rapid development of the so-called "Fifth generation" of movie directors, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, which added film as an adjunct to the study ofmodem Chinese literature, attracting not only scholars ofChinese literature but cinéastes and film students, not to mention movie fans. Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerkers and Kirk Denton's recent books are a reflection of the maturity of the field: they display at once a broad historical perspective and a meticulous attention to textual detail. Their books happen to share a common interest in the self—whether as "representation" in Feuerwerker, or "problematic" in Denton. And they complement each other in focusing on different writers: Feuerwerker looks at Zhao Shuli, Gao Xiaosheng, Han Shaogong, Mo Yan, and Wang Anyi; Denton at Hu Feng and Lu Ling. They are also remarkable for their deft and discreet...