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Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics
Many are familiar with European modernists' interest in Chinese art and poetry, however less well known is that Russian literature and art at the turn of 20th century also flourished in a sustained dialogue with China. In Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics, Jinyi Chu reconsiders the place of Russia in the genealogy of global modernism by exploring the enduring impact of China on pre-revolutionary Russian culture. This book argues that fin-de-siècle Russian ideas about increasing global cultural and socioeconomic interconnectedness emerged from their unsettling encounters with China. Drawing on literary texts, paintings, advertisements, official documents, and archival work in Russ...
Soft Matter
Identifies and examines a poetics of weakness in Soviet underground literature Artists of the late Soviet era sought new, nonconformist ways of approaching literary fiction, arriving at weakness as a crucial principle of narrative and character formation. Julia Vaingurt argues that this counter-discourse of strategic weakness constituted both an aesthetic strategy and an ethical code, affording like-minded authors a feeling of recognition and commonality and uniting an international community of artists in resistance to the divisiveness of their worlds. Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism explores the cultivation of weak subjectivity through modes such as gender sub...
Chinese Millennials
Through a unique combination of anecdotes, wide-ranging literary analysis, cultural commentary, and interviews, author Yang Qingxiang identifies certain core problems faced by his generation, and asks how they might be solved. Yang’s frank, sincere, and often unflattering assessment of contemporary Chinese society offers an illuminating and large-scale analysis of the new society that has taken shape over several decades of post-Mao economic reform, and its relevance has only been affirmed since it was first published in 2015.
A Global Enlightenment
A revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science. The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to...
Eurasia without Borders
Katerina Clark recovers the story of leftist world literature, a massive project that united writers from the Soviet Union, Europe, Turkey, Iran, India, and China to create a Eurasian commons: a single cultural space that would overcome national, cultural, and linguistic differences in the name of an anticapitalist and anti-imperialist aesthetic.
Laws of the Land
A groundbreaking history of fengshui’s roles in public life and law during China’s last imperial dynasty Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912). Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing p...
Written for the Drawer
Russian-Jewish writer Leonid Tsypkin (1926-82), a doctor by trade, wrote primarily "for the drawer," fearing professional consequences if he were to publish his fiction. Despite Tsypkin's almost complete lack of readership during his lifetime, his work has received international posthumous recognition, with Susan Sontag calling his work "among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century's worth of fiction." Tsypkin's autobiographical writing explored the impossibility of being both a Russian writer and a Soviet Jew, employing indirection and referentiality. In the first book-length appraisal of Tsypkin and his work, Brett Winestock considers Tsypkin's fiction as part of a transnational literary response to the horrors of the twentieth century, a reception that helps explain his much-belated international readership. Through close readings of Tsypkin's work in the context of late-Soviet cultural worlds, Winestock makes an important contribution to studies of Jewish Soviet writing and identity.
Internationalist Aesthetics
Winner, 2022 AATSEEL Best Book in Literary Studies, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and European Languages Honorable Mention, 2022 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association Following the failure of communist revolutions in Europe, in the 1920s the Soviet Union turned its attention to fostering anticolonial uprisings in Asia. China, divided politically between rival military factions and dominated economically by imperial powers, emerged as the Comintern’s prime target. At the same time, a host of prominent figures in Soviet literature, film, and theater traveled to China, met with Chinese students in Moscow, and placed contempo...
Red Migrations
Together with a new political, social, and cultural order, the Bolshevik Revolution also brought about a spatial revolution. Changed patterns, motivations, and impacts of migration collided with new cultural forms and aesthetic mandates. Red Migrations highlights the various multidirectional and multilateral transnational movements of leftist thinkers, artists, and writers. The book draws on avant-garde poets such as David Burliuk, Marxist theoreticians such as János Mácza, and “fellow travellers” such as Langston Hughes, revealing how leftists of all stripes were inspired and at times impelled by the Soviet Revolution to cross borders. It explores how the resulting circulation of idea...
