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The Novel of Details in Chinese Literary History

Jiwei Xiao traces the literary modes of the xijie xiaoshuo as it has registered successive periods of social and cultural change. From its emergence in the twilight of the Ming dynasty through to contemporary panoramas of urban and rural life, lineages of a multiform poetics of detail.

Belated Reunion?

One of China’s greatest modern writers, Eileen Chang reframed its traditional fictional forms to grapple with post-1919 realities: decline of the Qing aristocracy, price of female emancipation, devastation of the Sino-Japanese war. Jiwei Xiao asks how publication of her long-suppressed last novel alters understandings of Chang’s work.

A Traveller’s Glance

Object of fierce controversy when first shown, Antonioni’s documentary Chung Kuo—filmed in the PRC during the Cultural Revolution—has since been largely overlooked within his oeuvre. The director of L’avventura as failed Marco Polo, whose patient, humanizing gaze left a record of China’s past that is belatedly being rediscovered.