Reading China Against the Grain

Through an analysis of a wide array of contemporary Chinese literature from inside and outside of China, this volume considers some of the ways in which China and Chineseness are understood and imagined. Using the central theme of the way in which literature has the potential to both reinforce and to undermine a national imaginary, the volume contains chapters offering new perspectives on well-known authors, from Jin Yucheng to Nobel Prize winning Mo Yan, as well as chapters focusing on authors rarely included in discussions of contemporary Chinese literature, such as the expatriate authors Larissa Lai and Xiaolu Guo. The volume is complemented by chapters covering more marginalized literary figures throughout history, such as Macau-born poet Yiling, the Malaysian-born novelist Zhang Guixing, and the ethnically Korean author Kim Hak-ch'ol. Invested in issues ranging from identity and representation, to translation and grammar, it is one of the few publications of its kind devoting comparable attention to authors from Mainland China, authors from Manchuria, Macau, and Taiwan, and throughout the global Chinese diaspora. Reading China Against the Grain: Imagining Communities is a rich resource of literary criticism for students and scholars of Chinese studies, sinophone studies, and comparative literature

Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Genders, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. He is the author, editor, and translator of numerous books on global Chinese literature and culture. Mei-hwa Sung received her PhD in English from Brown University in 1983 and has taught at National Taiwan University, Tamkang University, and Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College (UIC). She has a long record of professional service, including the editorship of Chung-Wai Literary Monthly and Tamkang Review. She has published essays and books on eighteenth-century English literature, gender studies, and Taiwan fiction.

Part 1: Mainland China 1. Allegorizing History: Realism and Fantasy in Mo Yan's Fictional China 2. Unattainable Maturity: Yu Hua's Cries in the Drizzle as an Anti-Bildungsroman 3. Frankenstein vs. Dracula: Romanticisms and the Ideologies of Poetry in Contemporary China 4. Fanhua, Global Modernism, and the Art of Detachment Part 2: Border Regions 5. Wolf Totem: An Allegory of the Future 6. Writing the Motherland(s) on Their Borders: Kim Hak-ch'ol and His Cultural Criticism of Maoist China 7. Keeping to the Margins: Macau Literature and a Pre-postcolonial "Poetics of Insignificance" 8. Explaining "Graphs" and Analyzing "Characters": Zhang Guixing's Novels and Sinophone Literature's Cultural Imaginings and Representational Strategies Part 3: The Global Chinese Diaspora 9. Tales Out of School: Campus Fiction from Taiwan 10. The Practice of Annotation and Translation in Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen Mysteries 11. From "Chinese Diaspora" to "Sinospore": Multispecies Chineseness and Transmemory in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl 12. Xiaolu Guo's I Am China: On Copulas and Copulation