Whither Class?

Xueping Zhong is Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture in the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, Tufts University.

• 1. Introduction.- Part I. Quest for Revolutionary Modernity: Literature, Class, and the Challenges in the Making of a New People, 1910s-1940s.- 2. “National Character,” the Question of Class, and Lu Xun’s Fiction.- 3. Pen as Javelin: Zawen and Lu Xun’s Language of Class.- 4. From “Slumbering Masses” to “Revolutionary Masses:” Challenges in the Making of Revolutionary Literature.- Part II. Shifting Class Implications: Literature, Return of the "Repressed," and the Question of "the People," late 1970s and early 1980s.- 5. Debating Chinese Revolutionary Literature: From Cold War to the Age of Postrevolution.- 6. The Event of “New Era Literature” and Shifting Class Implications.- 7. Gender-Class Dialectics in the Rise of “New Era” Women’s Writing and the Return of Ding Ling.- Part III. Into the 21st Century: Literature, Tensions in the Language of Class, and the Rise of Postrevolutionary Working-Class Writing.- 8. Debating Soft Burial: Tensions in the Language of Class in 21st-Century Postrevolutionary China.- 9. Wen Cangmang: A 21st-Century Asking .- 10. Migrant Workers’ Literature, New Workers’ Culture, and the Question of Class Consciousness in the Age of Postrevolution.