Reading China

This groundbreaking volume opens a new window on both modern and traditional Chinese literature, history and popular culture, demonstrating how a new style of reading brings us—the modern reader—closer to understanding how Chinese citizens perceived their world and what their writings reveal about the culture that produced them.
Following the pioneering work of Professor Glen Dudbridge, this book brings together eight studies that develop a new style of reading Chinese sources by exploring the dynamics of discourse across open boundaries: those of fiction and history, literary and non-literary sources, official and vernacular culture, prose and poetry, records past and present, lost and extant, vernacular and classical, traditional and modern. Each chapter discusses how authors, editors and publishers use representation, editing and selection as means of self-fashioning and political propaganda.

Daria Berg, D.Phil. (1995) in Chinese Studies, University of Oxford, is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Nottingham. She has published extensively on Chinese literature and cultural history, including Carnival in China: A Reading of the Xingshi yinyuan zhuan (Brill, 2002).