Hundred Days’ Literature
Douban
Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902–1910
Lorenzo Andolfatto
Übersicht
In Hundred Days’ Literature, Lorenzo Andolfatto explores the landscape of early modern Chinese fiction through the lens of the utopian novel, casting new light on some of its most peculiar yet often overshadowed literary specimens. The wutuobang or lixiang xiaoshuo, by virtue of its ideally totalizing perspective, provides a one-of-a-kind critical tool for the understanding of late imperial China’s fragmented Zeitgeist. Building upon rigorous close reading and solid theoretical foundations, Hundred Days’ Literature offers the reader a transcultural critical itinerary that links Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward to Wu Jianren’s Xin Shitou ji via the writings of Liang Qichao, Chen Tianhua, Bihe Guanzhuren, and Lu Shi’e. The book also includes the first English translation of Cai Yuanpei’s short story “New Year’s Dream.”
contents
Acknowledgments
Editorial Note
Introductory Steps to Utopia
0.1Proposal for a Critical Itinerary within the Chinese Utopia of Modernity
0.2Preliminary Steps: Cai Yuanpei’s Xinnian meng
0.3Prospective Steps into the Late Qing Utopian Landscape
1 Of Textual Territories and Literary Cartographies
1.1Staking a Claim to Utopia
1.2Landscapes Long Overshadowed
1.3Tracing Boundaries to Cross, Drawing Grids to Escape
2 Gesturing Toward Utopia
2.1Liang Qichao’s Xin Zhongguo weilai ji; or, on Futures Unrealized
2.2Layers of Estrangement in Chen Tianhua’s Shizi hou
2.3If One Intends to Renovate the People of a Nation
3 Empires Erased, Empires Rewritten
3.1The Productive Distortion of Looking Backward
3.2Looking Further Backward versus Xin jiyuan: the Internecine Phase of Utopia
3.3Toward a Synthesis of Complementary Discourses
4 The Staging of the Utopian Spectacle
4.1Mending the Waterproof Covering of New China
4.2Utopia as a Spectacle on the Stage of History
4.3Familiar and Unfamiliar Rituals in Wu Jianren’s Xin Shitou ji
5 The Celebration of the Utopian Spectacle
5.1Utopia as a Geography of Language New and Old
5.2An Interplay of Absences
5.3Suvinian Nova, Utopian Tokens
Coda: Utopia’s Carnivalization
Appendix: New Year’s Dream, by Cai Yuanpei
Bibliography
Index