Christopher Rosenmeier
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748696369
- eISBN:
- 9781474434805
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748696369.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter provides an introduction to Xu Xu and Wumingshi and covers the book’s structure and methodology. It critiques the various terms that are used in both English and Chinese studies to ...
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This chapter provides an introduction to Xu Xu and Wumingshi and covers the book’s structure and methodology. It critiques the various terms that are used in both English and Chinese studies to categorise popular Chinese literature in the Republican period and it discusses the basis of the established divide between elite “new literature” (xin wenxue) and the much-castigated popular literature in China. It is argued that the term “Shanghai School” (haipai), a concept covering Shanghai popular literature from the 1920s to the 1940s, is too broad to be useful in analysing literature from this period or distinguishing between literary trends. The chapter also contains an extensive literature review, covering both English and Chinese works as they pertain to this study.Less
This chapter provides an introduction to Xu Xu and Wumingshi and covers the book’s structure and methodology. It critiques the various terms that are used in both English and Chinese studies to categorise popular Chinese literature in the Republican period and it discusses the basis of the established divide between elite “new literature” (xin wenxue) and the much-castigated popular literature in China. It is argued that the term “Shanghai School” (haipai), a concept covering Shanghai popular literature from the 1920s to the 1940s, is too broad to be useful in analysing literature from this period or distinguishing between literary trends. The chapter also contains an extensive literature review, covering both English and Chinese works as they pertain to this study.
Tan See Kam
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9789888208852
- eISBN:
- 9789888313518
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888208852.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong New Wave film Peking Opera Blues (1986) is set in a China marked by contestations between Republican democrats and monarchist revivalists (circa 1913). Through various acts of ...
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Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong New Wave film Peking Opera Blues (1986) is set in a China marked by contestations between Republican democrats and monarchist revivalists (circa 1913). Through various acts of reading film in different (though intertextually connected) ways along a formalist-historical-postmodernist continuum this book offers various reading strategies which reveal the film’s richness in terms of textual contours, textual affects, and ideological influences. Five acts of reading are explored which variously and collectively deconstruct the film’s playful intertextual and hypertextual configurations. Tsui Hark’s filmmaking career is summarized, and a polysemous analysis of the film’s story and form; its historical background; a companion film Shanghai Blues; Peking opera; Canto-pop and Mandarin songs; mandarin ducks and butterfly fiction; and the “three-women” film in Chinese-language cinema, are all explored within the general context of Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking and the issues of Chinese identity, culture, power in the contemporary politics of Hong Kong as they pertain to the Sinophone realms of articulations. Overall, the book asks a central question for film studies: does the film as a cultural and social artifact merely tell stories about the past or does it seek to reclaim lost territory in metafictional ways, with significant resonance for reading contemporary situations?Less
Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong New Wave film Peking Opera Blues (1986) is set in a China marked by contestations between Republican democrats and monarchist revivalists (circa 1913). Through various acts of reading film in different (though intertextually connected) ways along a formalist-historical-postmodernist continuum this book offers various reading strategies which reveal the film’s richness in terms of textual contours, textual affects, and ideological influences. Five acts of reading are explored which variously and collectively deconstruct the film’s playful intertextual and hypertextual configurations. Tsui Hark’s filmmaking career is summarized, and a polysemous analysis of the film’s story and form; its historical background; a companion film Shanghai Blues; Peking opera; Canto-pop and Mandarin songs; mandarin ducks and butterfly fiction; and the “three-women” film in Chinese-language cinema, are all explored within the general context of Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking and the issues of Chinese identity, culture, power in the contemporary politics of Hong Kong as they pertain to the Sinophone realms of articulations. Overall, the book asks a central question for film studies: does the film as a cultural and social artifact merely tell stories about the past or does it seek to reclaim lost territory in metafictional ways, with significant resonance for reading contemporary situations?
