New Literature in Chinese: China and the World
This book systematically discusses the academic connotations of the concept of “Modern Chinese Literature”, as well as its basic categories. The discipline founded upon this concept is influential both in China and throughout the world, and scholars engaged in teaching and research in this field number around ten thousand. The discipline was originally established in haste in an abnormal academic environment, and, with the passage of time, such derivative disciplines as “Contemporary Chinese Literature”, “20th Century Chinese Literature”, “the Literature of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau” and “World Chinese Literature” have appeared. This book argues that these fields should be united in the area of “New Literature in Chinese”, because they have a shared language, culture and tradition. In today’s multi-polar world, where Chinese literature is so diversified, such an approach is obviously helpful.
Dr Zhu Shoutong is Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Chinese at the University of Macau, and Chair Professor of Sichuan Normal University, China. He was a Senior Visiting Scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002. His fields of research are new literature in Chinese and comparative literature.
"The fact that Zhu is himself from China, and received all his education there, makes his argument for a global category of writing in Chinese all the more persuasive. There are 34 references to Taiwan listed in the index, for instance, and the book’s reach extends even further afield. The appeal for a pan-Chinese area of study looks so simple that one wonders what else the author will discuss to make a book-length argument. Zhu has plenty of additional and supportive ideas, however, backed up by an extraordinarily wide frame of reference. [...] New Literature in Chinese is a work by a notably learned, but also humane, authority, a man with exceptionally wide sympathies. The lucidity of his prose without doubt reflects the lucidity and analytical reach of his mind."
Bradley Winterton Taipei Times, 16.02.2017
“In fact, Zhu is sensitive to the cultural and linguistic diversity present in Chinese literature. It is precisely his sharp awareness of the cultural value of diasporic Chinese writers that informs his call for change in the discipline, which, he avers, has been defined strictly “according to political territories…New Literature in Chinese demonstrates Zhu Shoutong’s erudite scholarship in the field of modern Chinese literature. Some of his observations are interesting and suggestive. Zhu’s call for giving overseas Chinese writers equal footing in the discipline of modern Chinese literature and his stress on the importance of literary studies are both timely and commendable.”
-Wang Yuanfei, University of Georgia, Journal of Chinese Humanities 4, 2018
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