Critical biography of Shen Congwen, considered to be one of the greatest modern Chinese writers.

Four Sisters of Hofei is an intimate encounter with Chinese history, told through the collective memory and stories of four sisters born between 1908 and 1924, and with the benefit of the extraordinary knowledge of Yale historian Annping Chin. Now in their late eighties and early nineties, the Chang sisters lived through a century of historic change in China. In this extraordinary work, assembled with the benefit of letter, diaries, family histories, poetry, journals, and interviews, Annping Chin shapes the story of this family into a riveting chronicle that provides uncanny insight into the old China and its transition to the new. From their father, the Chang sister inherited reason and a belief in the virtues of modern education. From their mother they learned about the human spirit and the art of finding an appropriate path. Their nurse-nannies -- uneducated widows from the Hofei countryside -- contributed their own traditional beliefs and opinions on modern ways. As the sisters grew up, one broke with tradition to marry an actor, one survived the most violent political years of Communist rule, one married one of China's greatest novelists, and one, raised separately by her devout Buddhist great-aunt, was taught to be a rigorous practitioner of China's classical arts. The Chang sisters' prolific correspondence provides a rare glimpse of private life in China during the twentieth century, as well as a chronicle of the country from prosperity to persecution, from foreign wars to Cultural Revolution. In Chin's expert prose, Four Sisters of Hofei is an intensely person story that illustrates the complex history of a complex land.

Although deconstruction has become a popular catchword, as an intellectual movement it has never entirely caught on within the university. For some in the academy, deconstruction, and Jacques Derrida in particular, are responsible for the demise of accountability in the study of literature. Countering these facile dismissals of Derrida and deconstruction, Herman Rapaport explores the incoherence that has plagued critical theory since the 1960s and the resulting legitimacy crisis in the humanities. Against the backdrop of a rich, informed discussion of Derrida's writings -- and how they have been misconstrued by critics and admirers alike -- The Theory Mess investigates the vicissitudes of Anglo-American criticism over the past thirty years and proposes some possibilities for reform.

First published in 2010. At the beginning of this quarter of a century Chinese women still concealed herslef in her boudoir, and confined herself to needlework and embroidery, cooking and wahing nad sometimes composing poetry. This conservative tradition had lasted several thousand years. Only during the ned of the twenry five years a new China was born. The spirit of this period of change is expressed in the autobiography written around 1926.

First published in 1961, and reissued in new editions several times, this is the pioneering, classic study of 20th-century Chinese fiction. The book covers some 60 years, from the Literary Revolution of 1917 through the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. C. T. Hsia, Prof. Emeritus of Chinese at Columbia Univ., examines the major writers from Lu Hsun to Eileen Chang and representative works since 1949 from both mainland China and Taiwan. The first serious study of modern Chinese fiction in English, this book is also the best study of its subject available. Not only the specialist, but every reader who is interested in China or in literature will find it of interest. Hsia's astute insights and graceful writing make the book enjoyable as well as deeply edifying.

This volume gathers personal reflections on life and literature by 44 of China's leading authors. It aims to illustrate how Chinese society and its creative writing have supported, competed and fought with each other for the past 40 years and more. Much of what is revealed here is mundane, but the pressure of bringing art to social and political causes, indeed the universal pressure to survive, forges this collection into a very human document. The strengths and weaknesses of these essays offer a window on those of modern Chinese literature itself. Realism was the favoured literary doctrine of the day, and, reflecting this, most of these essays speak for themselves - about war, revolution, betrayal and commitment.

The most comprehensive and authoritative representation in English of the remarkable Shen Congwen canon, ranging from the polished stories that made him a serious contender for the Nobel literary prize in the 1980s to lesser known, extravagant experimental pieces.