This volume has brought together essays to explore, analyse and interpret the revolutionary tradition in modern Chinese literature over the past century from various angles. The authors examines the bodily or carnal dimension, especially the hidden implication of sexual passion, in revolutionary literature, formulate feminist critiques of the conception of women in literary expressions of revolution, explore the function of revolution as historical discourse and in historiographical representation, and discuss the reworking of revolutionary classics in recent literary and artistic endeavours. Here, revolution (in history and in literature) is conceptualized neither as an unquestionably progressive and creative force for a new world, nor an absolutely pejorative concept that necessarily leads to sociopolitical turmoil and tragedy. Insofar as postrevolutionary writings cannot but reappropriate the revolutionary spirit as their unavoidable and inseparable traumatic kernel, studies in revolutionary literature and culture, too, go through the zigzag experience of revolution in order to scrutinize its complex implications.
About the Author: Tao Dongfeng is Professor of Chinese at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China and specialized in contemporary Chinese literature and culture. His is author of Chinese Literature since Reform and Opening Up (1978-2008), Cultural Criticism in Contemporary China, and Cultural Studies: The West and China. Yang Xiaobin is Associate Research Professor at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica (Taiwan). He is author of The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction, History and Rhetoric, and Negative Aesthetics: Literary Theory and Cultural Criticism of the Frankfurt School. Rosemary Roberts is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is author of Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and has edited or co-edited four volumes of critical works on women's studies and cultural studies in China and East Asia including Ambiguities of Gender and Genre in Asian Cultures (with Tomoko Aoyama) and Gender and Performance in Asian Cultural Contexts (with Helen Creese). Yang Ling is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Literary Studies at Beijing Normal University. She is editor, with Prof. Tao Dongfeng, of Fan Cultures: A Reader.