The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China by Wang, David Der-Wei

The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780520238732)

Vendor: David Der-Wei Wang
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$34.95
$34.95
$34.95
Subtotal: $34.95
The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China by Wang, David Der-Wei

The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China

$34.95
The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China by Wang, David Der-Wei

The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China

$34.95
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
x
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.

Author: David Der-Wei Wang
ISBN-10: 0520238737
ISBN-13: 9780520238732
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 10/04/2004
Pages: 402
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.26lbs
Size: 8.96h x 5.94w x 0.99d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2005 pg. 1225
By David Der-Wei Wang
By David Der-Wei Wang
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David Der-wei Wang is Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Fin-de-Si鐵le Splendor: Repressed Modernity of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (1997) and Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (1992). He is the coeditor of Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey (2000).

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