Developmental fairy tales
Subtitle: evolutionary thinking and modern Chinese culture
By: Andrew F. Jones
Publisher: Harvard University Press; Brand: Harvard University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 259
ISBN-13: 9780674047952
Subjects: Chinese literature; Modernism (Literature); History and criticism; Literature and society; Fairy tales
Description: In 1992 Deng Xiaoping famously declared, "Development is the only hard imperative." What ensued was the transformation of China from a socialist state to a capitalist market economy. The spirit of development has since become the prevailing creed of the People's Republic, helping to bring about unprecedented modern prosperity, but also creating new forms of poverty, staggering social upheaval, physical dislocation, and environmental destruction. In Developmental Fairy Tales, Andrew Jones asserts that the groundwork for this recent transformation was laid in the late nineteenth century, with the translation of the evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, and Spencer into Chinese letters. He traces the ways that the evolutionary narrative itself evolved into a form of vernacular knowledge which dissolved the boundaries between breast and man and reframed childhood development as a recapitulation of civilizational ascent, through which a beleaguered China might struggle for existence and claim a place in the modern world-system.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The "development" of modern Chinese literature; title: The iron house of narrative: Lu Xun and the late Qing fiction of evolutionary adventure; title: Inherit the wolf: Lu Xun, natural history, and narrative form; title: The child as history in republican China: a discourse on development; title: Playthings of history; title: A narrow cage: Eroshenko, Lu Xun, and the modern Chinese fairy tale.