Imagined Homeland: Fifteen Arguments on Modern Literature

Author: Wang Deli, Huang Jingshu
Publisher: Commonweal Press
Publication Date: 2005-05-01
Features: Introduction "Imagined Homeland" selects fifteen essays by young scholars from East and West, showcasing the new trends in contemporary Sinological research. From the late Qing Shanghai literati's tales of the strange and supernatural to the late 20th-century Shanghai writers' urban writing; from the interaction between early Republican Beijing public opinion and media to the identity transformation of Taiwan's press industry during the Japanese colonial period; from the dialectics of revolution and enlightenment in the 1930s to the violence/revolution metaphor in martial arts fiction; from the violent discourse of Cultural Revolution narratives in the 1980s and 1990s to the avant-garde linguistic experiments of Taiwan's modern poetry society in the 1940s and the code-switching writing strategies of contemporary indigenous writers; from the intellectuals' reflection on national character to the novelists' shaping of "Imagined Homeland," all allow us to revisit the dramatic changes in a century of literary and cultural history, as well as the subtle threads that run through it. "Imagined Homeland" highlights the focus of contemporary East-West Sinological scholars on the dialectics of national imagination and construction, the underlying cultural production phenomena, and more importantly: the generation of rhetorical forms and narrative strategies in text, image, and discourse.