Reading China Against the Grain: Imagining Communities

Through an analysis of a wide array of contemporary Chinese literature from inside and outside of China, this volume considers some of the ways in which China and Chineseness are understood and imagined.

Using the central theme of the way in which literature has the potential to both reinforce and to undermine a national imaginary, the volume contains chapters offering new perspectives on well-known authors, from Jin Yucheng to Nobel Prize winning Mo Yan, as well as chapters focusing on auth...