Overview

Analyzing contemporary Chinese literature, film, and television, Shen shows the significance of nationalism for the mass imagination in post-socialist China. Chapters move from the intellectual idealism of the 1980s, through the post-Tiananmen transition, to the national cinema of the 1990s, and finally to the Internet literature of today.

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9781137497420

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Public Discourses of Contemporary China is an ambitious and illuminating book. Through fascinating case studies and a rigorous reconceptualization of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, Shen convincingly shows the persistent centrality of nationalism in China even today and elucidates the ways in which individual subjects both participate in and remake state-initiated modernization projects through narration and other forms of cultural production. It will be an essential read for anyone wishing to understand mass nationalism and the interaction between state and society in postsocialist China. - Tze-lan Deborah Sang, Professor of Chinese Literature & Visual Studies, Michigan State University, USA Public Discourses of Contemporary China dynamically illuminates mass nationalist aesthetics in postsocialist China. Yipeng Shen historicizes and theorizes his compelling analysis of films, television dramas, and literary works with considerable sophistication. His detailed account of complex dynamics conditioning the transition from socialist mass line aesthetics to neoliberal nationalism contributes important scholarship to fields of nationalism and aesthetics, as well as to modern Chinese studies. - Robin Visser, Associate Professor of Chinese, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Public Discourses of Contemporary China is an ambitious and illuminating book. Through fascinating case studies and a rigorous reconceptualization of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, Shen convincingly shows the persistent centrality of nationalism in China even today and elucidates the ways in which individual subjects both participate in and remake state-initiated modernization projects through narration and other forms of cultural production. It will be an essential read for anyone wishing to understand mass nationalism and the interaction between state and society in postsocialist China. - Tze-lan Deborah Sang, Professor of Chinese Literature & Visual Studies, Michigan State University, USA Offering several fresh readings of some now classic works, such as River Elegy (Heshang), Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji), and A Beijinger in New York (Beijingren zai Niuyue), as well as more recent manifestations of pop-culture and internet literature, this book is exemplary as a savvy engagement of postructural theory that displays equal facility with current scholarship on Chinese cultural studies published inside China and the West. As such, it is must reading for those interested in the fallout created by the interaction between the authoritarian state and free market economy. - Christopher Lupke, Professor of Chinese and Cinema Studies, Washington State University, USA Public Discourses of Contemporary China dynamically illuminates mass nationalist aesthetics in postsocialist China. Yipeng Shen historicizes and theorizes his compelling analysis of films, television dramas, and literary works with considerable sophistication. His detailed account of complex dynamics conditioning the transition from socialist mass line aesthetics to neoliberal nationalism contributes important scholarship to fields of nationalism and aesthetics, as well as to modern Chinese studies. - Robin Visser, Associate Professor of Chinese, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Author Information

Yipeng Shen is Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies and International Studies, Trinity College, USA.

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