Utopian Fiction in China

Shuk Man Leung, Ph.D. (2013), School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, is Assistant Professor of the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. Her works on late Qing and modern Chinese fiction, Hong Kong literature and print culture during the cultural Cold War have appeared in journals such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Asian Studies Review, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature Studies and Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese.

• AcknowledgementsList of FiguresIntroduction1 Historicizing Chinese Modernity and New Fiction’s Utopian Imagination2 New Fiction as a New Genre3 Utopian Fiction in China4 The Position of the Authors: Liang Qichao and His Contemporaries5 Chapter Summaries1 Establishment: New Fiction, Utopian Imagination, and the Generic System1 The Order of Things: Legitimization of Fiction in the Chinese Bibliography2 The Emergence of New Fiction and Its Generic Norms3 The Generic Features of New Fiction: The Future of New China4 Conclusion2 Dissemination: the Generic Features of the Utopian Imagination1 Generic Classification of New Fiction2 Conclusion: the Intergeneric Element of the Utopian Imagination3 Channels: the Political Function of Utopian Fiction and the Chinese Public Sphere1 Utopian Fiction as a Form of Public Opinion2 Utopia or Dystopia? China’s Partition and Revolutionary Journals3 Utopia(s) Realized? The Constitutional Campaign and Fiction Magazines4 Utopia beyond Constitutionalism: the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and Shanghai News5 Conclusion4 Origins: Liang Qichao and Chinese, Japanese, and Western Epistemology1 The Discourse of the Future2 The Discourse of the Nation3 Conclusion: Utopian Temporality and Spatiality5 Borderless Nations? Cosmopolitan Utopias with Anarchist and Socialist Faces1 A Cosmopolitan Utopia with an Anarchist Face2 The Third Road: Socialist Cosmopolitanism as a Moral Solution3 Conclusion: a Moral Order for Building a Nation/Society6 Crossing the Border: Chinese Settler Colonialism and a Borderless National Imagination1 The Discovery of Colonization and Chinese Nationalism2 Lü Sheng’s a Madman’s Dream: Deterritorialized China3 Yunnan Journal and Its Utopian Novels: Transnational Autonomy4 ConclusionConclusion: the Dual Community of New Fiction’s Utopian Imagination: Writing, Reading and Imagining1 The Way “We” Imagine2 The Way “We” Write and Read3 The Power of Utopia: History, Imagination and Knowledge FormationAppendix: FiguresBibliographyIndex

"In this meticulously researched and carefully argued new study, Shuk Man Leung guides her readers towards a coherent and complex understanding of Chinese “New Fiction” from the first decade of the twentieth century. Building on and moving beyond existing studies of the genre’s literary characteristics, Leung demonstrates its significance in sparking a “utopian imagination” that came to pervade all aspects of Chinese modernity, shaping the ways of knowing China’s future that circulated among participants in the period’s flourishing print culture, intellectual debate, and political activism."– Michel Hockx, University of Notre Dame"Shuk Man Leung’s monograph offers an in-depth and original investigation into Utopian fiction in Chinese in the final years of the Qing dynasty at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her work explores how this genre, imported through translation first of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, played a vital role in the reimagining of the political arena and the nation-state at this critical juncture in modern Chinese history. Leung also demonstrates how utopian visions of China’s future underpinned the entire project of modern Chinese literature. A must read for researchers in modern Chinese intellectual history, modern Chinese literature, and translation studies."– James St Andre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong"Literature does not merely represent reality/history; it creates “reality”/history that leads to a coming future through imagination at a critical historical turning point. Leung’s book precisely tells us how the Chinese literary modernity of utopian fiction in the early twentieth century contributed to modern Chinese nation-building. From a global perspective and fresh way, she demonstrates how modern Chinese utopian fiction functioned as an influential and unique mass medium and contributed to people’s identity formatting at the outset of Chinese nation-building. This book tells us how language, particularly utopian fiction, mediates and bridges between the past, reality and the coming future and how literary imagination can create history." – LIN Shaoyang, Distinguished Professor, History Department, University of Macau