Reading The Modern Chinese Short Story

A Reflection of Reality is an anthology of modern Chinese short stories designed as an advanced-level textbook for students who have completed at least three years of college-level Chinese. While many advanced-level Chinese language textbooks stress only practical communication, this textbook uses stories from well-known Chinese authors not only to enhance students' language proficiency, but also to expose students to the literature, history, and evolution of modern Chinese society. The twelve stories selected for this textbook are written by such contemporary authors as Yu Hua, Wang Anyi, and Gao Xingjian, and have appeared in various newspapers and magazines in China. Each story is filled with useful sentence structures, vocabulary, and cultural information, and is followed by an extensive vocabulary list, numerous sentence structure examples, grammar exercises, and discussion questions. The textbook also includes a comprehensive pinyin index. A Reflection of Reality will effectively improve students' Chinese language skills and their understanding of today's China. Advanced-level Chinese language textbook Selected short stories reflect contemporary Chinese society and culture Extensive vocabulary lists, sentence structure examples, grammar exercises, and discussion questions Comprehensive pinyin index

This reader for advanced students of Chinese presents ten post-1990 short stories by prominent writers such as Su Tong and Yu Hua, whose novels Raise the Red Lantern and To Live served as the basis for internationally acclaimed films. With its captivating content dealing with current social issues, it fills a gap in the literature for advanced language students who are eager to read extensively in “real” literature. Vocabulary lists free the student from the chore of constantly consulting a dictionary while reading, grammar and usage examples highlight new patterns, and questions for discussion explore the literary content. This all-fiction collection of contemporary works can be used as a text in language or literature courses or can be read independently.

Translations of six stories accompany seven papers from a workshop on critical approaches to modern Chinese short stories held at the U. of Hawaii in December 1982. With one exception, the essays analyze the stories presented, looking at such factors as the psychological structure, the narrator, ide

Brings together some of the best and most historically significant works of short fiction written in China in this century -including such important figures in the development of Chinese modernism as Lu Hsün, Mao Tun, Ting Ling, and Shen Ts' ung-wen. The companion volume to the highly acclaimed (Columbia, 1978), this new volume presents modernist short fiction from the thirty-year period leading up to the Communist revolution of 1949, after which Chinese literature entered a new phase of development. The stories range in setting from the late Ch'ing dynasty through the Sino-Japanese War and the early Communist years, and range in length from brief tales to substantial short novels. Though a large number of the writers represented are leftists, works of all political viewpoints have been included to provide the full literary panorama of one of the most fertile periods of Chinese creative activity.

Reading for the Moral offers an innovative reassessment of the nature of moral representation and exemplarity in Chinese vernacular fiction. Maria Franca Sibau focuses on two little-studied story collections published at the end of the Ming dynasty, Exemplary Words for the World (Xingshi yan, 1632) and Bell in the Still Night (Qingye zhong, c. 1645). Far from being tediously moralistic tales, these stories of loyal ministers, filial children, chaste widows, and selfless friends provide a deeper understanding of the five cardinal relationships central to Confucian ethics. They explore the inherent tension between what we might call textbook morality, on the one hand, and untidy everyday life, on the other. The stories often take a critical view of mechanical notions of retribution, countering it with the logic of virtue as its own reward. Conflict between passion and duty is typically resolved in favor of duty, a duty redefined with a palpable sense of urgency. In constructing vernacular representations of moral exemplars from the recent historical past rather than from remote or fictitious antiquity, the story compilers show how these virtues are not abstract or monolithic norms, but play out within the contingencies of time and space.

This collection of short stories reveals the plight and strength of the common Chinese people. There are contradictions between the 'new' and the 'old', and also between human values with enough integrity to nurture life, versus corruption that leads to the decline and death of a culture.

This book presents Chinese short-short stories in English and Chinese, integrating language learning with cultural studies for intermediate to advanced learners of Mandarin Chinese and students of contemporary Chinese literature. Each chapter begins with a critical introduction, followed by two or more stories in parallel Chinese and English texts; each story is followed by a vocabulary list, discussion questions, and a biography of the author. The chapters are organized around central concepts in Chinese culture such as li (ritual), ren (benevolence), mianzi (face/prestige), being filial, and the dynamics of yin and yang, as well as the themes of governance, identity, love, marriage, and change. The stories selected are short-shorts by important contemporary writers ranging from the most literary to everyday voices. Specifically designed for use in upper-level Chinese language courses, Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories: A Parallel Text offers students a window onto China today and pathways to its traditions and past as they gain language competence and critical cultural skills.

A panoramic vision of the Chinese literary landscape across the twentieth century. Award-winning literary scholar and poet Yunte Huang here gathers together an intimate and authoritative selection of significant works, in outstanding translations, from nearly fifty Chinese writers, that together express a search for the soul of modern China. From the 1912 overthrow of a millennia-long monarchy to the Cultural Revolution, to China’s rise as a global military and economic superpower, the Chinese literary imagination has encompassed an astonishing array of moods and styles—from sublime lyricism to witty surrealism, poignant documentary to the ironic, the transgressive, and the defiant. Huang provides the requisite context for these revelatory works of fiction, poetry, essays, letters, and speeches in helpful headnotes, chronologies, and brief introductions to the Republican, Revolutionary, and Post-Mao Eras. From Lu Xun’s Call to Arms (1923) to Gao Xinjiang’s Nobel Prize–winning Soul Mountain (1990), this remarkable anthology features writers both known and unknown in its celebration of the versatility of writing. From belles lettres to literary propaganda, from poetic revolution to pulp fiction, The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature is an eye-opening, mesmerizing, and indispensable portrait of China in the tumultuous twentieth century.

A dual-language edition of Chinese stories—many appearing in English for the first time This new volume of eight short stories, with parallel translations, offers students at all levels the opportunity to enjoy a wide range of contemporary literature from the world’s most spoken language, without having to constantly to refer back to a dictionary. The stories—many of which appear here in English for the first time—are by well-known writers as well as emerging voices. From a story by Li Rui about the honest simplicity of a Shanxi farmer to one by Ma Yuan exposing the seamy underside of contemporary urban society, they are infused with both rural dialect and urban slang and feature a wide range of styles and points of view. Complete with notes, the stories make excellent reading in either language.