Overview

The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China explores how an important group of Chinese performing artists invested in politics and the pursuit of the avant-garde came to terms with different ways of being “popular” in modern times. In particular, playwright and activist Tian Han (1898-1968) exemplified the instability of conventional delineations between the avant-garde, popular culture, and political propaganda. Liang Luo traces Tian’s trajectory through key moments in the evolution of twentieth-century Chinese national culture, from the Christian socialist cosmopolitanism of post–WWI Tokyo to the urban modernism of Shanghai in 1920s and 30s, then into the Chinese hinterland during the late 1930s and 40s, and finally to the Communist Beijing of the 1950s, revealing the dynamic interplay of art and politics throughout this period. Understanding Tian in his time sheds light upon a new generation of contemporary Chinese avant-gardists (Ai Wei Wei being the best known), who, half a century later, are similarly engaging national politics and popular culture.

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An outstanding contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of modern China and fills, at last, a long-overdue gap in Chinese literary, media, and theater studies by providing the first-ever monograph on Tian Han in English. [Luo's] terse and insightful study is surely bound to become a key resource for future scholarship on the intersections of modernist aesthetics, progressive politics, and popular media. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture --Rossella Ferrari Modern Chinese Literature and Culture

Author Information

Liang Luo is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Kentucky.

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