The stranger and the Chinese moral imagination / Haiyan Lee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lee, Haiyan, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chinese literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Chinese literature.

Chinese literature--21st century--History and criticism.

Strangers in literature.

Literature and society--China.

Literature and society.

Arts and society--China.

Arts and society.

Moral conditions.

China--Moral conditions.

China.

Physical Description:

xii, 362 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2014]

Summary:

In Modern China, the stranger has been a ubiquitous figure that tests the moral limits of a society known for the primacy of consanguinity and familiarity. This book surveys the Chinese moral landscape by examining literary encounters with several groups of strangers-foreigners in China, peasant migrants in cities, bourgeois intellectuals in exile, disenfranchised class enemies, uncloistered women, animals on the edge of human society, and apparitions in a secular age. It makes a twofold argument: that the pervasive sense of moral crisis in contemporary China has roots in both the Confucian and socialist pasts, and that imaginative literature is the best training ground for coping with the quintessential condition of modernity in which strangers are routinely thrown together. Book jacket.

Contents:

Fear and Hope in China 2

Strangers: A Group Biography 10

Lei Feng vs. Levinas: A Morality Play 17

Strangers: A Reading Guide 29

Part I Alien Kind

1 The Benighted and the Enchanted 37

The Chinese Sphinx and the Prevaricating intellectual 39

The Subaltern Goddess and the Crusading Party 44

The Homespun Priest and the Pilgrimaging Ethnographer 51

The Taiwanese Ghost and the Revenant Daytrippers 59

2 Animals Are Us 71

Anthropomorphism and Zoomorphism 72

The Bare Life of Animals 82

Animal Totemism 100

Why Animals? 110

Part II Fictive Kin

3 The Power and Pollution of the Stranger Woman 117

Fu Caiyun/Sai Jinhua: The Courtesan Who Saves the Empire 120

Zhenzhen: The Spy Who Refuses to Go Home 136

Nixi/Mrs. Samson: The Widow Who Never Was a Wife 139

Li Guoxiang: The Cadre Who Terrorizes a Town 147

From Parvenu to Pariah 154

4 The Country and the City 158

Civility, Govern mentality, and the Making of Ruralites and Urbanites 161

To Be a Gentiemnn 170

Maids, Tenants, and the Comedies of Stranger Sociality 178

Part III Friends and Foes

5 The Enemy Within 197

Class Racism and the Logic of Displacement 202

The Water Dungeon and Socialist Horror 211

The Rent Collection Courtyard and the Law of History 216

The Maoist Political 236

6 Foreign Devils 243

"Foreign Devils" and the Unmaking of Tianxia 246

Cosmopolitan Peasants in Devils on the Doorstep 253

Cosmopolitan Nannies in Nannies for Foreigners 263

To Be a Foreigner 280

Conclusion: Literature and the Veil of Ignorance 285

The Writerly and the Readerly 288

What Good Is (Chinese) Literature? 296.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780804785914

0804785910

OCLC:

880237398