Cultural Revolution Manuscripts

Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-030-73385-8
Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 283 Seiten, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm, Gewicht: 396 g

Reihe: Chinese Literature and Culture in the World

This book investigates handwritten entertainment fiction (shouchaoben wenxue) which circulated clandestinely during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lena Henningsen’s analyses of exemplary stories and their variation across different manuscript copies brings to light the creativity of these readers-turned-copyists. Through copying, readers modified the stories and became secondary authors who reflected on the realities of the Cultural Revolution. Through an enquiry into actual reading practices as mapped in autobiographical accounts and into intertextual references within the stories, the book also positions manuscript fiction within the larger reading cosmos of the long 1970s. Henningsen analyzes the production, circulation and consumption of these texts, considering continuities across the alleged divide of the end of the Mao-era and the beginning of the reform period. The book further reveals how these texts achieved fruitful afterlives as re-published bestsellers or as adaptations into comic books or movies, continuing to shape the minds of their audience and the imaginations of the past.

Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Henningsen, Lena

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Ost- & Südostasiatische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: The writing and rewriting of an exemplary shouchaoben: Zhang Yang’s The Second Handshake during the Cultural Revolution.- Chapter 3: Texts on travel: stability across variation and secondary authorship in espionage shouchaoben fiction.- Chapter 4: Shouchaoben as literary avant-garde: Open Love Letters and Waves.- Chapter 5: Ways of reading: Cultural Revolution reading acts.- Chapter 6: World literature and intertextuality: reading acts in shouchaoben fiction.- Chapter 7: From underground into the mainstream: shouchaoben fiction on the commercial book market.- Chapter 8: Conclusion: Shouchaoben fiction as texts in motion.

Über Autor(innen)

Lena Henningsen is Professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany. As a specialist of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chinese literature, she has published widely on popular literature, reading culture and consumer culture in the People’s Republic of China. Her research has been supported by, among others, the European Research Council and the German Young Academy.