Research Catalog

Title

Socialist cosmopolitanism : the Chinese literary universe, 1945-1965 / Nicolai Volland.

Author

Volland, Nicolai

Publication

• New York : Columbia University Press, 2017.
• ©2017

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Series Statement

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Uniform Title

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.

Subject

• Chinese literature > 20th century > History and criticism
• Socialism and literature > China
• Socialism in literature
• Communism and literature > China
• Communism in literature

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-270) and index.

Contents

Introduction -- 1. The politics of texts in motion -- 2. The geopoetics of land reform in Northeast Asia -- 3. Fictionalizing the international working class -- 4. Soviet spaceships in socialist China -- 5. Sons and daughters of the Revolution -- 6. Mapping the brave new world of literature -- Conclusion.

Call Number

JFE 17-5043

ISBN

• 9780231183109 (cloth : acid-free paper)
• 0231183100 (cloth : acid-free paper)

LCCN

2017002233

OCLC

964383647

Author

Volland, Nicolai, author.

Title

Socialist cosmopolitanism : the Chinese literary universe, 1945-1965 / Nicolai Volland.

Publisher

New York : Columbia University Press, 2017.

Copyright Date

©2017

Description

xii, 281 pages ; 24 cm

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-270) and index.

Summary

Socialist Cosmopolitanism" offers an innovative interpretation of literature from the Mao era, proposing to read Chinese socialist literature as world literature. China after 1949 engaged with the world beyond its borders in myriad ways and on many levels-political and economic, cultural as well as literary. Far from rejecting the worldliness of earlier eras, Nicolai Volland demonstrates, the young People's Republic developed its own cosmopolitanism. Rather than a radical break with the past, Chinese socialist literature should be seen as an integral and important chapter of China's long search to find a place within world literature. Socialist Cosmopolitanism revisits a range of genres, from poetry and land reform novels to science fiction and children's literature, and shows how Chinese writers and readers alike saw their own literary production as part of a much larger literary universe. This literary space, reaching from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Pyongyang, from Warsaw to Moscow to Hanoi, allowed authors and texts to travel, in the course reinventing the meaning of world literature. Chinese socialist literature is driven by a hugely ambitious-and ultimately doomed-attempt to redraw the literary world map.

Chronological Term

1900-1999

Research Call Number

JFE 17-5043