Monster That Is History
Regular price
€38.99
20th century
A01=David Der-Wei Wang
ancient china
asia scholars
Author_David Der-Wei Wang
brutal history
Category=DS
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Category=NHF
china
chinese history
chinese violence
crime and punishment
cultural violence
decapitation
discussion books
enlightenment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethnic issues
gender issues
geopolitical change
historians
historical
history of violence
literary criticism
literary critics
literary landscape
modernity
monstrous history
nonfiction
politics
rationality
representation
students and teachers
suicide
taowu
textbooks
Product details
- ISBN 9780520238732
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 04 Oct 2004
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until it became identifiable with history itself. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese - often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude - this book places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers modern Chinese history as a complex of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and personal articulations of bygone and ongoing events. His discussion ranges from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of hunger and starvation to the technology of crime and punishment.
David Der-wei Wang is Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Fin-de-Siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernity of Late Qing Fiction, 1849--1911 (1997) and Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (1992). He is the coeditor of Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey (2000).
