Public Discourses of Contemporary China: The Narration of the Nation in Popular Literatures, Film, and Television (Chinese Literature and Culture in the World)

Exploring contemporary Chinese literature, film, and television, Yipeng Shen sheds light on the historical significance of nationalism for mass imagination and identification in the less-than-democratic system of China for the past three decades. Analyzing cultural products from a wide range of media, chapters move from the intellectual idealism of the 1980s, through the post-Tiananmen transition, to the national cinema of the 1990s, and finally to the Internet literature of today. Public Discourses of Contemporary China argues that Chinese subjects have, to varying degrees, transformed the state project of modernization into their own through mass aestheticization of the nation.