BOOKS - Developmental Fairy Tales
US $7.51
805982
805982
Developmental Fairy Tales
Author: Andrew F. Jones
Year: 2011
Format: PDF
File size: PDF 9.5 MB
Language: English
Year: 2011
Format: PDF
File size: PDF 9.5 MB
Language: English
In 1992 Deng Xiaoping famously declared Development is the only hard imperative What ensued was the transformation of China from a socialist state to a capitalist market economy The spirit of development has since become the prevailing creed of the People s Republic helping to bring about unprecedented modern prosperity but also creating new forms of poverty staggering social upheaval physical dislocation and environmental destruction In Developmental Fairy Tales Andrew Jones asserts that the groundwork for this recent transformation was laid in the late nineteenth century with the translation of the evolutionary works of Lamarck Darwin and Spencer into Chinese letters He traces the ways that the evolutionary narrative itself evolved into a form of vernacular knowledge which dissolved the boundaries between beast and man and reframed childhood development as a recapitulation of civilizational ascent through which a beleaguered China might struggle for existence and claim a place in the modern world system This narrative left an indelible imprint on China s literature and popular media from children s primers to print culture from fairy tales to filmmaking Jones s analysis offers an innovative and interdisciplinary angle of vision on China s cultural evolution He focuses especially on China s foremost modern writer and public intellectual Lu Xun in whose work the fierce contradictions of his generation s developmentalist aspirations became the stuff of pedagogical parable Developmental Fairy Tales revises our understanding of literature s role in the making of modern China by revising our understanding of developmentalism s role in modern Chinese literature
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