Modern Language Quarterly recent issues

Form and History: Reading as an Aesthetic Experience and Historical Act

Armstrong, P. B. — 2008-05-16

Ethos, Poetics, and the Literary Public Sphere

Randall, D. — 2008-05-16

"This More Delusive": Tantalus and Seneca in Paradise Lost

Byville, E. — 2008-05-16

Nicholas Rowe's Tamerlane and the Martial Ideal

Richardson, J. — 2008-05-16

Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance

Woodbridge, L. — 2008-05-16

Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662 - 1785

Aravamudan, S. — 2008-05-16

The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century

Flint, C. — 2008-05-16

Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism

Fry, P. H. — 2008-05-16

Victorian Interpretation

LaPorte, C. — 2008-05-16

The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction

Egginton, W. — 2008-05-16

Rethinking Modern Chinese Literature in a Global Context

Ning, W. — 2008-02-21

Opening the Cultural Mind: Translation and the Modern Chinese Literary Canon

Yifeng, S. — 2008-02-21

Translation has played a critical role in forming the modern Chinese literary canon and continues to stimulate its change and expansion. It is instrumental to the exchange and synthesis of foreign narrative modes and aesthetic paradigms. There are obvious political, cultural, and literary reasons for the formation of a literary canon, and to a degree literary production is inseparable from cross-cultural (re)production. The literary canon appropriates and is also appropriated by translations. Many modern Chinese literary concepts derive from translations, especially of Western literary and theoretical writings. By investigating the assimilation of translations into the Chinese literary canon, this essay focuses on a hybridized political and cultural discourse that marks a radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities in modern Chinese literature. The call for reshaping the literary canon responds to changing modes of discourse in foreign literatures. The effects of canon formation reveal the patterns of the canon's manipulation and expansion in the modern Chinese political, cultural, and literary context.

Lu Xun and Modernism/Postmodernism

Gu, M. D. — 2008-02-21

Although Lu Xun (1881–1936) produced all his literary works in a period that coincided with the heyday of Western modernism (1910–30), scholars both inside and outside China have made few attempts to study them in the international context of the modernist movement. Because of Lu Xun's concern with the fate of the Chinese nation and his professed intention to be its spiritual physician, critical opinion holds that his writings are primarily political and cultural in thematics and realistic in formal representation. The scholarly consensus that he is a master of critical realism remains unchanged. However, Lu Xun's vision of literature and his writing techniques also draw on features common to symbolism, surrealism, supernatural realism, grotesque realism, magic realism, and other experimental forms. Since these are modernist, even postmodern, features, it would be of great interest to explore Lu Xun's relationship to the modernist movement that swept the West in the early twentieth century and the extent to which his writings anticipated postmodernism. I argue that his work should be viewed as a contribution to the international modernist movement from a non-Western, Third World country. Indeed, no history of international modernism is complete if it does not incorporate the incipient modernism that Lu Xun pioneered independently of the West.

Women and the Search for Modernity: Rethinking Modern Chinese Drama

He, C. — 2008-02-21

Because the theories of Chinese modernity are mainly organized around a masculine norm and pay insufficient attention to the specificity of women's lives and experiences, it is of great significance to carry out research on women's complex and changing relationships to the political, philosophical, and cultural legacies of Chinese modernity. This essay explores the relationship of women to Chinese modernity through a close reading of canonical texts from modern Chinese drama. The transformations of women in Chinese spoken plays during the first half of the twentieth century reflect the complex experiences of Chinese women in their search for modernity. The Nora figures in Chinese problem plays are symbols of individualism and subjectivism. The women in Cao Yu's plays, whose education is informed by feminist ideas, become subjects of their desires for consumption and love. The female fighters in revolutionary drama further deconstruct the patriarchy of gender, and their stories influenced the new development of gender politics in modern China. In general, the discourses of women's liberation were refashioned on the different stages of modern Chinese drama in parallel with the development of modern Chinese society. The essay suggests that women were actually heroines of Chinese modernity.

New Humanism

Tonglu, L. — 2008-02-21

Originally proposed by Irving Babbitt and Elmer More, and inspired by Buddhist and Confucian philosophies, New Humanism opposed the moral decline fostered by relativist and determinist beliefs and by an increasingly materialistic American society during the early twentieth century. Brought back to China and transformed by Chinese scholars who had studied with Babbitt, New Humanism became a counternarrative to the May Fourth Movement, to Marxism, and to radicalism in general. This essay delineates the roles New Humanism played in China, its internal contradictions, and its intricate relationship with hegemonic discourses by examining the literary practices of three New Humanists who demonstrated, respectively, ideal/academic, political, and transcendental ways of engagement.

Becoming-Obscure: A Constant in the Development of Modern Chinese Poetry

Yongguo, C. — 2008-02-21

Both historically and theoretically, this essay traces the development of modern Chinese poetry, including the Chinese symbolists of the 1920s, the modernists of the 1930s, the Nine Leaves of the 1940s, the obscurists of the 1970s, and the post-obscurists of the Third Generation of the 1980s, to the Western source from which the Chinese New Poets learned the techniques of modern Western poetry and introduced them into China by way of adaptation and imitation. At that point a new leaf was turned in the history of Chinese poetry: the mingling of the foreign elements, especially the obscurant that was constant in Western poetry, with vernacular Chinese expression gave birth to the New Poetry.

Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents: The Dialectic between the Global and the Local in Lao She's Fiction

Huang, A. C. Y. — 2008-02-21

Modern Chinese fiction dealing with cultural others can be taken as a lens through which to reread the cosmopolitan theory. At stake in the debate between communitarianism and liberalism are the viability of single cultural membership and its validity. Lao She's Self-Sacrifice (1934) and Dr. Wen (1936–37) question the viability of global cultural membership. For Lao She, cultural hotchpotch—as suggested by Salman Rushdie—is not an option. These novellas dramatize the dialectic between the global and the local at a crossroads of Chinese nationalism and Western imperialism. Lao She's representation of Dr. Mao and Dr. Wen also pose challenging questions for his contemporaries and for twenty-first-century readers alike: Can one ever refuse to be defined by the local, either by birth or by acculturation? What are the implications and consequences if one so chooses?

The Political Campaign as Genre: Ideology and Iconography during the Seventeen Years Period

Braester, Y. — 2008-02-21

The essay examines films produced during the Seventeen Years period (1949–66) and suggests that political campaigns may be akin to film genres. Insofar as generic distinctions of theme and style are produced according to the shifting interests of critics and producers, campaigns have produced a politically motivated typology. The examination of campaigns as genrelike offers an opportunity to rethink the connection not only between Maoism and its cultural manifestations but also between ideology and form in general.

Chinese Postmodernist Fiction

Fokkema, D. — 2008-02-21

The title of this essay implies that there is a Chinese postmodernism that differs from American or European postmodernism. But the different postmodernisms also have a common basis, which can be found at the level of unstable signification. First the author briefly sketches how the concept of postmodernism traveled from the United States to western Europe and Russia, with key roles for American critics such as John Barth, Leslie Fiedler, Ihab Hassan, and Matei Calinescu and, in Europe, writers such as Umberto Eco and the reception of Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. To the author, Chinese postmodernism differs from other variants of postmodernism because of its different cultural-historical and literary-historical background. With few exceptions, modernism was a late discovery in China. After 1978 Wang Meng, Zhang Jie, Wang Anyi, and others wrote fiction in a modernist style. The simultaneity of modernism and postmodernism is a clue to the interpretation of Chinese fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. Postmodernist exuberant fabulation, partly inspired by Gabriel García Márquez and partly by traditional Chinese fiction, can be found in fiction by Mo Yan, Yu Hua, and Han Shaogong. Please Don't Call Me Human (Qianwan bie ba wo dang ren, 1989), by Wang Shuo, who was recently honored with a Chinese compilation of "research material concerning Wang Shuo" (Tianjin, 2005), is also discussed.

Popular Culture and Body Politics: Beauty Writers in Contemporary China

Lu, S. H. — 2008-02-21

This essay is a study of a group of women writers who emerged on the Chinese literary scene in the late 1990s and the turn of the twenty-first century. They have been called beauty writers (meinü zuojia), referring to the authors themselves being beautiful women. Their writings are characterized by an unabashed, unprecedented foregrounding of female sexuality. While their novels were censored by the state now and then, they circulate on the Internet and contribute to the formation of China's booming Internet literature. The initial core group of beauty writers has made a large impact on other aspiring female writers eager to explore and expose their sensuality and sexuality. The parading and pandering of female subjectivity via a body politics have become a major literary fad in contemporary mainland China.

Reading (about) Modern Chinese Literature in a Time of Globalization

Miller, J. H. — 2008-02-21

Milton, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Mythography of Terror

Appelbaum, R. — 2007-10-29

"A Very Knowing American": The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Swift's Modest Proposal

Ross, I. C. — 2007-10-29

Henry Mackenzie's Report on Ossian: Cultural Authority in Transition

Manning, S. — 2007-10-29

Valencia's Verlaine: The Social History of a Colombian Verse

Garcia, J. M. R. — 2007-10-29

Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture

Hayes, J. C. — 2007-10-29

A New History of German Literature

Bennett, B. — 2007-10-29

How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719-1900; The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel

Miller, A. H. — 2007-10-29

Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry

Reed, B. M. — 2007-10-29

The French Aesthetic of Spenser's Feminine Rhyme

Wilson-Okamura, D. S. — 2007-08-06

Against Apollo: Gongora's Soledad primera and the Mapping of Empire

Padron, R. — 2007-08-06

Don Quijote 1 and the Forging of National History

Fuchs, B. — 2007-08-06

Aesthetic Specialists and Public Intellectuals: Ruskin, Emerson, and Contemporary Professionalism

Leypoldt, G. — 2007-08-06

The Grounds of English Literature

Georgianna, L. — 2007-08-06

Writers on the Market: Consuming Literature in Early Seventeenth-Century Spain

Johnson, C. B. — 2007-08-06

Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity

Kezar, D. — 2007-08-06

The Triumph of Imperfection: The Silver Age of Sociocultural Moderation in Europe, 1815-1848

Marshall, D. G. — 2007-08-06

About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz

Breithaupt, F. — 2007-08-06

The Influence of Post-modernism on Contemporary Writing: An Interdisciplinary Study

McHale, B. — 2007-08-06

The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory

Shaviro, S. — 2007-08-06