Chinese American Literature
Chinese American literature encompasses literary works written by Chinese Americans, exploring themes of identity, immigration, and cultural assimilation. It reflects the experiences and perspectives of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the United States, often addressing issues of discrimination, family dynamics, and the search for belonging. This body of literature contributes to a diverse and rich tapestry of American literary expression.
4 Key excerpts on "Chinese American Literature"
eBook - ePubTaiwan: A New History
A New History
- Murray A. Rubinstein(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The decade’s best-known essayists—Chang Hsiu-ya, Chung Mei-yin, Hsu Chung-p’ei, Liang Hsuan, and Ch’i-chun—were therefore all mainlander writers. The wide popularity of traditionalist prose among general Chinese readers was explained by the eminent sinologist Jaroslav Prusek. As Prusek puts it, traditional Chinese literature is a refined, sensitive form of polite writing, one in which “all experiences had to pass the censorship of beauty[;] only what was wen or ‘beautiful’ being allowed to pass into the temple of literature, also designated wen, while all evil and ugly emotions were excluded.” Although more than half a century has passed since the Chinese New Literature replaced the old, traditional aesthetic assumptions, the “censorship of beauty,” is still prevalent among Chinese readers and writers, especially among older people. Realistic Fiction Having in their formative years been exposed to works of Lu Hsun, Mao Tun, Pa Chin, and Lao She, mainland émigré writers active in the 1950s and 1960s by and large carried on the Chinese “realist” tradition—a somewhat atrophied version of nineteenth-century European realism—established during the May Fourth era and the 1930s. For political reasons, however, they consciously or unconsciously modified those realistic conventions that might have been offensive to the dominant culture of post-1949 Taiwan: Revolutionary and proletarian themes were taboo, and references to class consciousness were also avoided. Nevertheless, the nature of literary conventions is such that their suppression can never be as complete as it appears on the surface...
eBook - ePubTensions in World Literature
Between the Local and the Universal
- Weigui Fang, Weigui Fang(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Rather, in a historical overview, trends will be identified from which an approach to a traditional Chinese concept of literature might be possible. Against this backdrop and secondly, the relevance of Chinese literature within a (Western) concept of world literature will be discussed, and this on the basis of a representative collection: The Norton Anthology of World Literature (in six volumes). Thereafter, I will conclude by turning to Goethe’s idea of world literature, which he conceived of mainly through an encounter with Chinese literature. Chinese Writing and Written Language The “literatures” (belles lettres —and thus today’s fiction) are a European invention of the eighteenth century. Etymologically, literature is what is “written” (Latin letterae, the letters). And so the pre-modern European notion of literature tended less toward some kind of “aestheticism,” but rather to erudition or “learning”; that is, its object was the comprehensive knowledge of the written tradition. Regarding this conceptual history, there is already a parallel to a Chinese notion of literature: apart from the fact that we have here—in contrast to the European development—not the epic and drama, but the poem at the forefront of literature, we also have, with the important Chinese term wen 文, “writing, literature”—an equivalent of the pre-modern European concept of literature. Regarding a pre-modern understanding of literature in China, two distinctly Chinese peculiarities have to be considered: the language and script, as well as the role of literati-officials as guardians of a cultural tradition based on writing. As is well known, Chinese is an isolating, non-inflecting and tonal language, of which the smallest units of meaning (morphemes) are pronounced with one syllable and are intonated (in modern standard Chinese) in four different ways: the so-called four tones. In writing, these smallest units of meaning are the characters...
eBook - ePubThe Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature
Friends and Foes on the Battlefield
- Minjie Chen(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 Chinese Youth Literature An Overview This chapter chronicles the development of Chinese youth literature—loosely defined as non-curriculum publications primarily read by children and young adults—within the dynamic social, political, and cultural context of modern China. 1 As Zipes (2006) has reminded us, researchers must recognize the “complex historical transformation” that children’s literature has gone through and avoid “simplistic assumptions about its role and meaning in different cultures throughout the world” (p. xxix). To conduct a comparative study of how youth literature published in mainland China and the United States has represented the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), we should first be conscious of differences in the history of young people’s leisure reading in the two countries. An introduction to Chinese youth literature will not only keep us abreast of the context of the Chinese works to be examined in this study, but also highlight some of the concepts, standards, and assumptions widely understood in American youth literature research but not readily applicable to Chinese juvenile works. This chapter contains three parts. It begins with a chronological overview of Chinese youth literature, followed by an examination of lian huan hua (连 环 画, hereafter LHH), which was a popular format of pictorial reading materials enjoyed by Chinese youth for most of the twentieth century...
eBook - ePub- A-Chin Hsiau(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...For them the spirit of resistance against alien oppression formed the motif of Taiwanese literature. The term “Taiwanese literature” assumed increasing political significance in the first half of the 1980s. In his oft-cited article, “The Present Problem of the Indigenization of Taiwanese Literature,” Ch’en Fang-ming under the pen name of Sung Tung-yang, rediscovered the neglected disagreement between Yeh shih-t’ao and Ch’en Ying-chen presented during the controversy over hsiang-t’u literature. Ch’en Fang-ming noted that Yeh’s concept of “Taiwanese [hsiang-t’u] literature” was based on a wholesome “Taiwanese consciousness,” while Ch’en Ying-chen’s notion of “Chinese literature in Taiwan” showed unrealistic “Chinese consciousness.” For Ch’en Fang-ming the two kind of consciousness were incompatible. He thought that Ch’en Ying-chen wrongly put the blame for adversities suffered by China in the past century on Western imperialist powers. The oppressive character of Chinese nationalism itself, which had justified the KMT’s authoritarian rule and the Mainlander-Taiwanese inequality, Ch’en Fang-ming maintained, must also be criticized. He believed that when the opposition movement was rapidly developing, any writer who identified himself with the island must pursue the “indigenization” and “autonomy” (tsu-chu-hsing) of Taiwanese literature (Sung, 1984a). The most thorough politicized definition of Taiwanese literature was probably framed by Li Ch’iao. Drawing on Yeh Shih-t’ao’s and P’eng Juichin’s ideas, Li defined it in this way: Taiwanese literature is the literature that is written from a Taiwanese standpoint and deals with Taiwanese experience. The “Taiwanese standpoint” is the standpoint of the people who place their feet on Taiwan’s soil...
