Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Humanities — Language & Literature — Asian & Oceanian

Many scholars still contend that strict, well-defined boundaries should be maintained between academic disciplines. This has certainly been the case in China studies for many decades now.  However, some younger scholars are challenging this line of thinking and producing studies that are truly interdisciplinary.  Demonic Warfare:Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel is a good example.  Meulenbeld (Chinese religion, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) presents an innovative, sophisticated study of how Daoist religious exorcism rituals (designed to protect local communities) that feature martial stories about brave and protective gods influenced the structure and themes of some important vernacular novels--specifically, Fengshen yanyi (Canonization of the Gods)--in the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644).  Meulenbeld's book is significant for two reasons: first, in his mining of numerous primary sources the author convincingly demonstrates that aspects of Daoist ritual, theater, and temple activities influencedin a significant wayMing dynasty culture and society in general and the vernacular novel in particular; second, a truly interdisciplinary approach to scholarship (like this one) can potentially provide much greater understanding and more new knowledge than can working the old-fashioned way within strictly defined disciplinary borders.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Posted on China's in-country websites and now increasingly distributed through mobile applications, online poetry, fiction, and essays ("born-digital" or transcribed from hard copy), popular genre novels (romantic, martial arts, erotic), and reader comments (perfunctory or elaborate) are more voluminous and often more ephemeral (or nimble) than the Communist Party or any existing medium can "capture," whether for preservation or erasure.  Hockx (SOAS, Univ. of London, UK) provides engaging representative snapshots of this digital literary and subliterary universe, c. 1994-2014.  Online voices come alive, thanks to the author's personal involvement with Chinese Internet literature since its inception; citations of vanished web pages now available only in archives; and lucid contextualizing of online activity, using his authoritative prior research on China's "old-fashioned" 20th-century literary associations and print venues.  Hockx argues that China's digital communication fosters avant-garde literary innovation (though generally in linear forms, without hypertext); new (virtual) literary communities, icons, and idols; and new publishing business models.  If Chinese Internet literature is already in decline, a fear even Hockx voices, this book will still have captured a major transition in Chinese creativity.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Wang (Harvard) offers a bold, persuasive interpretation of the history of modern Chinese literature.  Continuing a discourse ignited by Leo Ou-fan Lees groundbreakingThe Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (1973), Wang expands the scope of the discussion by offering a panoramic view that extends beyond the period 19171949, bringing to the foreground the continuity of a spirit of lyricism in the writing of Chinese intellectuals and artists.  Whereas both Wang's and Lees works represent a distinctive departure from the orthodox approach of literature criticism prevalent in the teaching of literature and history in the People's Republic of China, Wang draws largely on sources published in the era after the Cultural Revolutionresources that were unavailable at the time Lees book was published.  Thus, Wang fills the widening gulf between the views of Chinese literary critics and Western critics.  Wangs book by no means replaces Lees, but it serves as a convincing, significant update of that earlier pioneering work.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.