Böcker av David Der-wei Wang

Topics covered include Chinese/Sinophone identity in the digital age; the challenges and opportunities of digital media, including the impact of censorship; decentralization versus the hegemonic exercise of cultural memory in China and beyond; cultural memory as imagined nostalgia in consumer culture; and the power of social media and popular culture in identity formation. Contributors Fangdai Chen, Yedong Chen, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, Rossella Ferrari, Chieh-ting Hsieh, Liang Luo, Michael O'Krent, Xiaofei Tian, Laura Vermeeren, David Der-wei Wang, Zhiyi Yang, Michelle Ye

A reinterpretation of three modern Chinese writers whose work, the author argues, gave rise to the polyphonic development of realism in Chinese literature.

What do Chinese literature and film inspired by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) have in common with media of the May Fourth movement (1918-1930)? This book demonstrates several shared aims: to liberate narrative arts from aesthetic orthodoxies, to draw on foreign sources for inspiration, and to free individuals from social conformity.

In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until it became identifiable with history itself. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese-often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude-this book places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers modern Chinese history as a complex of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and personal articulations of bygone and ongoing events. His discussion ranges from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of hunger and starvation to the technology of crime and punishment.