Coming of Age in Chinese Literature and Cinema

With the inclusion of twelve original articles by established and emerging international scholars, this volume offers critical reading of literary and cinematic texts produced in China and Sinophone communities between the 1950s and 2010s. The articles portray the lineage and mutations of the Chinese Bildungsroman, providing insights into the tensions between individual and society; nation and the world; and the multiple social, ecological, and virtual realities of recent decades. Concerned with how coming-of-age narratives have persistently returned and evolved over time, the book addresses themes such as family and social change; gender, class, and generational divides, local/global politics, and the ecological and posthuman turns in Chinese/Sinophone culture. It offers a fresh look on how the transnational and transgenerational journeys of Bildungsroman and coming-of-age narratives continuously transform and reinvigorate generic conventions, to explore adolescence as a formative social force and aesthetic experience in Chinese/Sinophone literature and film.This book aims to open up dialogues for better understanding emergent cultural forms that reflect social instability arising from the global spread of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism, and to constitute the foundation of an innovative history of Sinophone literature. It does not only take into account the complicated survival struggles of the subjects of Mao's revolution including refugee-immigrants turned colonial subjects, but also the interaction between literature and the arts as well as between human and nonhuman agents (place, material culture, nature, etc.).

Andrea Riemenschnitter is professor em. of Modern Chinese Language and Literature, University of Zurich. Her most recent book is Sinophone Utopias. Exploring Futures Beyond the China Dream (2023, co-ed.). She has published in Archiv Orientalni, AS, ICCC, Interventions, JMLC, MCLC, Monumenta Serica, etc. Kiu-wai Chu is Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities and Chinese Studies at Nanyang Technological University. He is a National Humanities Center Fellow 2022-23. His research focuses on environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and contemporary cinema and visual art in China and broader Asia. Mung Ting Chung is Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Calgary. Her research interests include Hong Kong literature, Sinophone studies, and the cultural Cold War. Her first monograph, Writing Beyond Borders: Hong Kong Literary Production in the Early Cold War Era (tentative title), will be published by Brill.

Acknowledgements, Note on Romanizations and Translations, Introduction, SECTION I: The Global Sixties and Leftist Activism, 1 The Socialist Bildungsroman and Global Youth: Wang Meng and Jack Kerouac Wendy Larson, 2 Growing Up in an Age of Turbulence: The Bildungsromane of Young Hong Kong Writers in the Sixties Mary Shuk-han Wong, 3 Abandoning Iowa's Modernism: Wan Kin-lau Renounces His Bildung in the Cold War Era Mung Ting Chung, SECTION II. Afterlives and Unstable Repositionings, 4 Mapping and Contesting the Notion of Sinophone: The Coming of Age of Global Chinese Literature Sheldon Lu, 5 The Coming of Age of Hong Kong: Dung Kai-cheung's Celestial Creations and the Works of Man: Vividness and Veracity Enoch, Yee-lok Tam, 6 Coming of Age and Learning to Live (with Ghosts) in Borneo's Rainforest Alison M. Groppe, SECTION III. Screening Urban Precarity, 7 Little Pinks, Shamate Kids, and the Involuted Generation: A Coming-of-Age Portrait of China's Post-'90s Generation Kiu-wai Chu, 8 Sentimentality and the Capitalization of Humanity: On Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo Pheng Cheah, 9 Years of the Yearning Youth: Growth, Flows, and the Dilemma of Maturity in Hong Kong Coming-of-Age Films Fiona Y. W. Law, SECTION IV. The Ecological and the Posthuman, 10 Spectral Mappings: Coming of Age in Su Tong's Shadow of the Hunter Andrea Riemenschnitter, 11 Coming of Age in Post-urban Hong Kong: An Ecocritical Approach to Land-writing and Land-filming Winnie L. M. Yee, 12 Becoming a Cyborg: Female Coming of Age in Chen Qiufan's Waste Tide Hua Li, Complete Bibliography, Index Keywords, Contributors.