Subjectivity and Realism in Modern China

The questions of subjectivity and the literary style of realism, as manifested in Hu Feng's theoretical writings and Lu Ling's fictional writings, occupy a unique position in modern China. By looking more closely into the theoretical and fictional texts and the social-historical subtext, and through a re-examination of the issue of subjectivity and individualism, this book argues that individualism should not be treated as an ahistorical value-system, but understood within changing historical contexts; subjectivity should not be treated as an issue of personal choice, but as class-based and derived from collective community. To differentiate different subjectivities and the diversified foci of individualism in differing historical periods, Xiaoping Wang finds we need to explore the intellectuals' cultural-political strategy by situating them in the particular historical conjuncture and in the particular cultural fields. With this hermeneutical practice, the politics of recognition and the politics of style are mutually illuminated.

Considers the works of Hu Feng and Lu Ling as political agendas

Offers new insights to larger issues of cultural politics and ideologies during 1930s and 40s in modern China

Analyzes the relationship between the question of subjectivity and literary style of realism

Autorentext

Xiaoping Wang is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Tongji University, China. His major publications include Contending for the "Chinese Modern": The Writing of Fiction in the Great Transformative Epoch of Modern China 1937-1949 (2019), China in the Age of Global Capitalism: Jia Zhangke's Filmic World (2019), Ideology and Utopia in China's New Wave Cinema: Globalization and Its Chinese Discontents (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), Postsocialist Conditions: Ideas and History in China's "Independent Cinema", 1988-2008 (2018), and Chinese Literature and Culture in the Era of Global Capitalism: Renaissance or Rehabilitation? (2021).

Inhalt

Introduction.- Chapter One: Cultural Capital, Hegemony and the Zeitgeist.- Chapter Two: Intellectuals' Politics and a Bourgeois Subjectivity.- Chapter Three: Subjectivity in Loss: Disintegration of Traditional Family and Emergence of Desire.- Chapter Four: Subjectivity in Search of: Bildungsroman of Modern Chinese Intellectuals.- Chapter Five: Subjectivity in Vain:A Fable of the Failure of Bourgeois Social Reforms.- Chapter Six: Intellectuals in Predicament: Other Stories.- Chapter Seven: Politics of Recognition and Politics of Style.- Chapter Eight: Self-Other Relationship and the Other as the People.- Chapter Nine: Lu Ling's Theory and His Fiction.- Conclusion.