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Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian. By XIAOBING TANG. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. xiii, 380 pp. $64.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).
Professor Xiaobing Tang opens his most recent book, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian, by making reference to Liang Qichao's famous turn-of-the-century reflections on the link between the mass novel and "spiritual cultivation" (p. 11) (this having been one of the concerns of Tang's first book, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao) and then proceeds to explore the implications of this dialectic of mass culture and political engagement for our understanding of Chinese cultural production from throughout the twentieth century as a whole. Chinese Modern is a meticulously researched and theoretically sophisticated exploration of the dialectics of political/cultural transcendence (the "heroic") and everyday-ness (the "quotidian"), as they have informed a range of aesthetic and ideological discourses from Liang's day to the present. The book is comprised of ten chapters, plus two "excursions," which are arranged chronologically and include detailed discussions of authors such Lu Xun, Ding Ling, Ba Jin, Xiao Ye, and Su Tong, as well as the revolutionary drama The Young Generation and the urban films Good Morning Beijing (Zhang Nuanxin, dir.) and Black Snow (Xie Fei, dir.). From Wu...