Telling Details

What is a detail? How is it different from xijie, its Chinese counterpart? Is "reading for the details" fundamentally different from "reading for the plot"? Did xijie xiaoshuo, the Chinese novel of details, give the world its earliest form of modern fiction? Inspired by studies of vision and modernity as well as cinema, this book gazes out on the larger world through the small aperture of the detail, highlighting how concrete literary minutiae become "telling" as they reveal the dynamics of seeing and hearing, the vibrations of the mind, the complexity of the everyday, and the imperative to recognize the minute, the humble, and the hidden. In a strain of masterpieces of xijie xiaoshuo, such details play a key role in pivoting the novel from didacticism towards a capacious modern form.
Examining the Chinese detail as both a common idiom and a unique concept, and extrapolating it from individual works to the culture at large, reveals under-explored areas of the Chinese novel: its psychological depths, its connections with other genres and forms, its partaking in Chinese material life and capitalist modernity, as well as repressions and difficulties surrounding its reception in national and international contexts. With carefully chosen case studies, Xiao's book not only exemplifies the value of deep reading in approaching complex works of Chinese fiction as world literature, it also throws light on the aesthetics and politics of "the unseen," which has become central to a humanist tradition that flows across literature, cinema, and other art forms.

Jiwei Xiao is Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures (Chinese) at Fairfield University. She is a scholar of comparative literature and Chinese cinema. Her wide-ranging publications have appeared in New Left Review, New York Review of Books, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, MCLC, and Journal of Contemporary China. Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature is her first book.

Preface Introduction Part One Detail and Difference Part Two Fiction of Details 1. In the Realm of the Senses: Looking into Jin Ping Mei 2. Seeing is Remembering: Zhang Dai's Rhapsodic Texts and Modern Chinese Lyrical Fiction 3. Silent Strangers and Strange Silence: The Edge and the Center of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai 4. Fragments of Time, Fiction of Details: Eileen Chang, Late Style, and World Literature 5. From Border Town to the Frontier of the Mind: Shen Congwen's Passage to the World 6. Jia Pingwa's Mountains and Seas: "Untranslatable" Fiction as World Literature Afterword