Telling Details

This book intensifies the dialogue between Chinese fiction and world literature by focusing on a common literary idiom, the detail.

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