Internet Literature in China

by Michel Hockx

Overview

Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions.

Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, he presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still drawing a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China—and across Asia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231160827
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	02/10/2015
Series:	Global Chinese Culture
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	728,366
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Michel Hockx is professor of Chinese at SOAS, University of London, and founding director of the SOAS China Institute. He studied Chinese language and literature at Leiden University in The Netherlands and at Liaoning University and Peking University in China. His research looks at modern and contemporary Chinese literary communities and the way they organize themselves, their relation to the state, and the technologies they employ to distribute their work. He is the author of Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937 and A Snowy Morning: Eight Chinese Poets on the Road to Modernity.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note on Online Sources
Introduction
1. Internet Literature in China: History, Technology, and Conventions
2. Linear Innovations: Chen Cun and Other Chroniclers
3. The Bottom Line: Online Fiction and Postsocialist Publishing
4. Online Poetry in and out of China, in Chinese, or with Chinese
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Michel Hockx's book is the first Western study to provide a global introduction to online literature in China.... In sum, this is an important contribution, not only to Chinese studies but also to the study of digital literature elsewhere in the world.

China Perspectives - Shuang Xu

Internet Literature in China is elegantly written. This tour de force constitutes fascinating and illuminating documentation, stories and critique of Chinese online literature. . . . It is a must-have for Chinese literature researchers and postgraduate students who wish to know more about Chinese Internet literature and relevant social ritual and political censorship that have transformed Chinese culture and society.

Asian Studies Review - Xiaoping Gao

Hockx's meticulous documentation of China's Internet culture is an invaluable contribution for anyone interested in this largely overlooked and essential aspect of postsocialist Chinese society, and constitutes an indispensable resource to the study of globalizing Chinese media culture.

Journal of Asian Studies

This important account of the other China is timely and incisive. It reveals a virtual People's Republic that is furtive, creative, and resilient. Hockx speaks insightfully of China's post-socialist past and guides us toward its gravid and disruptive future.

Geremie R Barmé

A pioneering effort that will set a milestone in the research of online literature and will be a reference work for students and researchers for years to come.

Daria Berg

[Internet Literature in China] provides engaging representative snapshots of this digital literary and subliterary universe.... Essential.

Choice

As a well-known figure in the field of modern Chinese literature, Hockx is well positioned to bridge the gap between literary studies and internet culture. His book will become a standard citation in Chinese internet studies.

Guobin Yang

Internet Literature in China is one of the first books to survey the field of electronic literature in China, and Hockx's analyses show the complex interrelations between literary production, internet technologies, and social contexts in postsocialist China. His conclusions challenge and extend received wisdom about how digital technologies affect literary productions in Western contexts. For example, he argues that innovative effects do not require and are not limited to nonlinearity in literary texts. This excellent book should be read by every serious scholar of digital literature, especially those who have based their ideas solely on Western contexts.

N. Katherine Hayles

Essential reading for any researcher interested in Chinese Internet literature and Internet culture.

Asien: The German Journal on Contemporary Asia - Elisabeth Schleep

An extraordinary introduction, analysis and study of Chinese Internet Literature.

Publishing Research Quarterly - Yihan Lou

Michel Hockx's Internet Literature in China constitutes a path-breaking study on this huge phenomenon and makes a crucial contribution to the mapping of the country's complex and varied system of online literary communities.... Essential reading not only for literary and Internet scholars within the field of Chinese studies, but also for anyone interested in contemporary Chinese culture and society.... Students and non-specialist readers will equally be grateful to Michel Hockx for writing such an easily accessible, informative and engrossing book.

China Information - Giorgio Strafella

Hockx has documented a fascinating moment in time.

Times Literary Supplement - Ross Perlin

Michel Hockx provides a rare look at the processes of social transformation that have touched the intimate lives of people and communities through web portals, apps, microblogs and other online media. His refreshing ethnography captures a precarious moment of postsocialist literary innovation, transgression, and aberrations in its full complexity. This book is the best introduction available in English to the psychic landscape of contemporary Chinese netizens who know how to play with censors to articulate their personal desires, fantasies, phobias, and exhibitionism.

Lydia H. Liu

Hockx enables readers to get a vivid and interesting glimpse into the ingenuity, fluidity, interactivity, and transgressiveness of postsocialist China's important cultural phenomenon.

The China Review - Chu Shen

Internet Literature in China is a fantastic and novel contribution to the study of literary production in the digital age, and one that is bound to appeal far beyond the field of Chinese literature.

Casey Brienza

This important account of the other China is timely and incisive. It reveals a virtual People's Republic that is furtive, creative, and resilient. Hockx speaks insightfully of China's post-socialist past and guides us toward its gravid and disruptive future.

Geremie R Barmé