"A comprehensive tool to help students of Chinese read Chinese literature in its original form. Footnotes highlight the more difficult vocabulary and pinyin is provided for the entire text. ... Historical events, people, and places are explained throughout and illustrations recreate the scenes."--Page 4 of cover.

This book delves into the Chinese literary translation landscape over the last century, spanning critical historical periods such as the Cultural Revolution in the greater China region. Contributors from all around the world approach this theme from various angles, providing an overview of translation phenomena at key historical moments, identifying the trends of translation and publication, uncovering the translation history of important works, elucidating the relationship between translators and other agents, articulating the interaction between texts and readers and disclosing the nature of literary migration from Chinese into English. This volume aims at benefiting both academics of translation studies from a dominantly Anglophone culture and researchers in the greater China region. Chinese scholars of translation studies will not only be able to cite this as a reference book, but will be able to discover contrasts, confluence and communication between academics across the globe, which will stimulate, inspire and transform discussions in this field.

The essays included in this Capturing Chinese Reader are some of the best from revolutionary China. Reading the great literature of Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Zhu Ziqing, Zhou Zuoren, and Lin Yutang is essential for a comprehensive understanding of Chinese history, and literature. Due to its complex writing system, Chinese is one of the most difficult languages in the world. Full literacy of Chinese requires a working knowledge of three to four thousand Chinese characters and breaking into reading Chinese literature is a daunting task. Capturing Chinese Stories: Prose and Poems by Revolutionary Chinese Authors presents some of the most influential works of modern Chinese literature as a comprehensive tool to help students of Chinese read Chinese literature in its original form. Footnotes highlight the more difficult vocabulary and pinyin is provided for the entire text. There is no need to constantly consult a dictionary or to look up difficult characters by radical. Historical events, people, and places are explained throughout. The text used in this book is in simplified characters. - Full story unabridged in simplified Chinese - Pinyin for the entire text - Definitions for difficult vocabulary - Historical explanations and summaries - Author illustrations - Free MP3s read by two native speakers Free audio files of Capturing Chinese Stories: Prose and Poems by Revolutionary Chinese Authors are also included with the purchase of this book and are available for download from the publisher's website. The audio files include both a woman and male speaker. (coming soon)

Jia Pingwa's novels have caused both fame and controversy throughout the Chinese speaking world. This pioneering study examines the corpus of Pingwa's writings, emphasizing his importance, prominence and relevance to modern Chinese society.

This powerful memoir of a WWII POW recounts his incredible journey from joining the British Army to life as a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese military. Peter Jackson was young and recently married when he was drafted into the British Army at the start of World War II. He was sent to Singapore just as the city was being evacuated, and within days he was taken prisoner by the Imperial Japanese Army. Peter was one of the very few to survive the hardship, illnesses and brutality that followed. Like so many he was forced into labor, first in Singapore and then on the infamous Thai-Burma railway. But while there, he remarkably escaped with seven other soldiers. When recaptured, he was treated harshly. Jackson’s memoir brings to life both the characters of his comrades and the Japanese soldiers and guards he encountered. Though the experience was truly harrowing, and many of his fellow prisoners despaired at losing years of their young lives, Jackson maintained a sense of hope that they would one day return home

This volume illuminates the relationship of China's radical past to its reformist present as China makes a way forward through very differently conceived and contested visions of the future. In the context of early twenty-first century problems and the failures of global capitalism, is China's history of revolutionary socialism an aberration that is soon to be forgotten, or can it serve as a resource for creating a more fully human and radically democratic China with implications for all of us? Ranging from the early years of China's revolutionary twentieth-century to the present, the essays collected here look at the past and present of China with a view toward better understanding the ideas, ideals, and people who have dared to imagine radical transformation of their worlds and to assess the conceptual, political, and social limitations of these visions and their implementations. The volume's chapters focus on these issues from a range of vantage points, representing a spectrum of current scholarship. The first half of the book brings new insights to understanding how early-twentieth century intellectuals interpreted ideas that allowed them to break with China's past and to envision new paths to a modern future. It treats of Chen Duxiu, a founder of the Communist party, Mao Zedong, and Mao in relation to the non-Communist Liang Shuming and with the Dalai Lama. With continuing threads of nation and nationalities, of peasants, utopias and dystopias linking the chapters, the book's second half looks broadly at the consequences of the implementations of radical ideas, at the same time critiquing our accepted frameworks of analysis. Moving up to the present, the book investigates the effects of the reforms since the 1980s on long-term environmental degradation and on the emergence of a capitalist rural economy. It gives an unsparing view into contemporary rural China through independent films. The book concludes with an analysis of the unshakable persistence of the shibboleth, 'the rise of China,' in popular and academic imagination and argues for the importance instead of taking seriously the twentieth-century history of radicalism in China and its significance for understanding China's present and its future potentials.

An insightful look into contemporary Chinese avant-garde fiction and the problem of Chinese postmodernity

Engaging with fiction films devoted to heroic tales from the decade and a half between 1949 and 1966, this book reconceives state propaganda as aesthetic experiments that not only radically transformed acting, cinematography and screenwriting in socialist China, but also articulated a new socialist film theory and criticism. Rooted in the interwar avant-garde and commercial cinema, Chinese revolutionary cinema, as a state cinema for the newly established People's Republic, adapted Chinese literature for the screen, incorporated Hollywood narration, appropriated Soviet montage theory and orchestrated a new, glamorous, socialist star culture. In the wake of decolonisation, Chinese film journals were quick to project and disseminate the country's redefined self-image to Asia, Africa and Latin America as they helped to create an alternative vision of modernity and internationalism. Revealing the historical contingency of the term 'propaganda', Chan uncovers the visual, aural, kinaesthetic, sexual and ideological dynamics that gave rise to a new aesthetic of revolutionary heroism in world cinema. Based on extensive archival research, this book's focus on the distinctive rhetoric of post-war socialist China will be of value to East Asian Cinema scholars, Chinese Studies academics and those interested in the history of twentieth-century socialist culture.

Brings together some of the best and most historically significant works of short fiction written in China in this century -including such important figures in the development of Chinese modernism as Lu Hsün, Mao Tun, Ting Ling, and Shen Ts' ung-wen. The companion volume to the highly acclaimed (Columbia, 1978), this new volume presents modernist short fiction from the thirty-year period leading up to the Communist revolution of 1949, after which Chinese literature entered a new phase of development. The stories range in setting from the late Ch'ing dynasty through the Sino-Japanese War and the early Communist years, and range in length from brief tales to substantial short novels. Though a large number of the writers represented are leftists, works of all political viewpoints have been included to provide the full literary panorama of one of the most fertile periods of Chinese creative activity.