The Monster That Is History History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China

• Main Author: David Der-Wei Wang
• Format: eBook Book
• Language: English
• Published: Berkeley, Calif University of California Press 2004
• Edition: 1
• Series: Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian Studies
• Subjects: 20th century; ancient china; Asia; asia scholars; brutal history; china; Chinese fiction; Chinese fiction > 20th century > History and criticism; Chinese fiction > Taiwan > History and criticism; chinese history; chinese violence; crime and punishment; cultural violence; decapitation; discussion books; enlightenment; ethnic issues; gender issues; geopolitical change; historians; historical; HISTORY; HISTORY / Asia / General; History and criticism; history of violence; literary criticism; literary critics; literary landscape; modernity; monstrous history; nonfiction; politics; rationality; representation; students and teachers; suicide; Taiwan; taowu; textbooks; Violence in literature; Taiwan; chinese violence; geopolitical change; politics; chinese history; enlightenment; history of violence; historical; literary landscape; representation; textbooks; taowu; 20th century; literary criticism; rationality; crime and punishment; historians; students and teachers; brutal history; cultural violence; ethnic issues; modernity; suicide; monstrous history; nonfiction; ancient china; china; discussion books; asia scholars; decapitation; literary critics; gender issues
• ISBN: 9780520231405; 0520231406; 9780520238732; 0520238737; 9780520937246; 0520937244
• DOI: 10.1525/9780520937246

In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until it became identifiable with history itself. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese—often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude—this book places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers modern Chinese history as a complex of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and personal articulations of bygone and ongoing events. His discussion ranges from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of hunger and starvation to the technology of crime and punishment.