Global Chinese Literature

This path-breaking collection of critical essays introduces a diverse range of approaches to open up the field of modern Chinese literature to new cross-regional, local, and global analyses. Each of the ten essays deals with a particular conceptual problem or case study of different locations and modalities of Chinese-language, or Sinophone, production. From language to music, literature to popular culture, minority politics to internal diaspora, theories of sinography to China's quest for the Nobel Prize, this volume brings together leading and new voices in the study of Chinese literature from a variety of comparative and intranational perspectives. Contributors include scholars from Asia, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. It is an indispensable reference for anyone interested in contemporary China and the global politics of Sinophone literature.

``This thought-provoking anthology has opened up many fascinating questions. Although its intended readership is scholars from literary studies, anyone who is interested in the interplay between language, ethnicity and identity should not miss it.``
Zhengdao Ye, The Australian National University

Jing Tsu, Ph.D. (Harvard University), is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at Yale University. She is author of Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937 (Stanford University Press, 2005) and Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2010).

David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. He is author, editor, and co-editor of numerous publications in English and Chinese, including The Monster That is History: Violence, History, and Fictional Writing in 20th Century China (University of California Press, 2004); Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (Duke University Press, 2007).

"This book offers a rich and thought-provoking engagement with this concept, raising the fundamental question of what 'global Chinese literature' means and what is at stake in naming it Sinophone...this is the first sustained effort to open up the Sinophone to multiple understandings."
– Paola Iovene, University of Chicago, in The China Journal 69 (January 2013).

"This edited volume is a timely collection of essays on a significant question in China studies: how to categorise and theorise about literature (and creative texts in other media) produced outside the boundaries of Mainland China in the Chinese language or in other languages by ethnic Chinese writers."
– Yiyan Wang, Victoria University of Wellington, in Asian Studies Review 37.1 (2013).

"This thought-provoking anthology has opened up many fascinating questions [...] anyone who is interested in the interplay between language, ethnicity and identity should not miss it."
– Zhengdao Ye, The Australian National University, in New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 13.2 (December 2011).