Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism: From Russia, with Squalor

Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism shows that early twentieth century Chinese writers drew upon Russian texts about the socially downtrodden to describe poverty, in a bid to enrich Chinese culture by creating a syncretic new realism. Modern Chinese realist writers turned to the topic of material poverty--peasants suffering from famine, exploited urban laborers, homeless orphans--to convey their sense of textual poverty and national backwardness. The combination of a radically new subject matter and experimentation with diverse literary resources, indigenous and foreign, generated major innovations in narrative technique. Depicting poverty allowed writers to revolutionize the nascent forms of modern Chinese narrative, innovating strategies of representing the nation, the social other, time, and space, while problematizing their deployment of squalor for aesthetic purposes. This book examines why Russian literature, itself long preoccupied with a problem of belatedness vis-à-vis Western Europe, occupied a privileged place for Chinese intellectuals of this era. Comparing Chinese fiction about poverty to Russian intertexts by Gogol, Andreev, Chekhov, Turgenev, and others, the book shows how Chinese writers drew and innovated upon themes (such as madness or human animality) and formal elements (such as metonymy). Keru Cai’s multi-scalar approach emphasizing close textual analysis situates modern Chinese realism in the trans-Eurasian axis of world literature.

Keru Cai, Lecturer in Chinese Studies, School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews

Keru Cai is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the School of Languages, University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on modern Chinese appropriations from Russian, English, and French literatures. She has published widely on Chinese and comparative literature, in journals such as Modern Language Quarterly, Comparative Literature, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, and Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews. Prior to joining the University of St Andrews, she taught at Penn State University and held a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.