Revolution and Its Narratives: China's Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949-1966

摘要

Cai Xiang's study of socialist literary and cultural imaginaries, originally published in 2010, is one of the most provocative books on post-1949 Chinese literature and culture appearing in Chinese since the beginning of the new century. Its English version, Revolution and Its Narrative, brilliantly edited and meticulously translated by Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong, makes a significant and timely contribution to ongoing debates about the cultural-political legacies of revolutionary China. As the two translators suggest in their Introduction, "the relationship among Chinese narratives of revolution, modernity, and socialism in the Maoist period ... generally has been dismissed in English-language studies of modern Chinese literature"; Cai's book argues against this "dismissal" and "thus presents a potential map for future research" (xi). They summarize Cai's inquiry as a "theoretical mediation on the historical and aesthetic possibilities opened up by, as well as the ultimate impossibility of writing a literature adequate to, the socialist transformation of China in the 1950s and 1960s" (xii).