商品詳細

In the view of Gregory Lee, approaches to the study of modem Chinese culture based on a mythical orientalist China constructed by its dominant "Other" (the West) have run their course, and it is time to break free from them. Here he critically re-examines Chinese poetry in the 20th century and aims to restore it as a cultural form equal to any other and thus worthy of examination in its own right. However, his analysis covers the production and consumption of a range of 20th-century Chinese divergent cultural practices, including poetry and pop music, and the survival of the lyric in a Communist, and now increasingly capitalist, society that favours nationalistic, homogenous forms of cultural expression. A comparison is made with the resurgence of hybrid cultures in France and the West, and there is a discussion of representations of the Chinese, and part-Chinese, in the diaspora, and of their literary self-representations. Lee concludes that with the help of the lyric it is possible to imagine a future in our now globalized society.