Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture Cannibalizations of the Canon [Hardcover]

Through analyses of a wide range of Chinese literary and visual texts from the beginning of the twentieth century through the contemporary period, the thirteen essays in this volume challenge the view that canonical and popular culture are self-evident and diametrically opposed categories, and instead argue that the two cultural sensibilities are inextricably bound up with one another.

An international line up of contributors present detailed analyses of literary works and other cultural products that have previously been neglected by scholars, while also examining more familiar authors and works from provocative new angles.The essays include investigations into the cultural industries and contexts that produce the canonical and popular, the position of contemporary popular works at the interstices of nostalgia and amnesia, and also the ways in which cultural texts are inflected with gendered and erotic sensibilities while at the same time also functioning as objects of desire in its own right. 

As the only volume of its kind to cover the entire span of the 20^thcentury, and also to consider the interplay of popular and canonical literature in modern China with comparable rigor, Rethinking Chinese Popular Cultureis an important resource for students and scholars of Chinese literature and culture.

Introduction: The Disease of Canonicity Carlos Rojas  Part I: Producing Popularity  1.  Perverse Poems and Suspicious Salons: The Friday School in Modern Chinese Literature Michel Hockx  2. The Formation of the Professional Author as a Figure in Early Twentieth Century Vernacular Fiction Alexander Des Forges  3. Serial Sightings: News, Novelties, and Zhang Henshui's An Unofficial History of the Old Capital Eilel£o