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Introduction and Summary Texts for Modern Chinese Literature

I’m listing here some texts that summarise or introduce the academic field of modern Chinese literature. Whilst taking a modern Chinese literature course this year (C17 at Cambridge), I’ve felt like I was thrown in at the deep end and am only just beginning to grasp the core themes. It would’ve been helpful to me to see some gentler introductions and summaries first, and hopefully the list below will provide that to others.

  • [MCLC's book reviews](http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/reviews.htm) - very nice way to grasp main contents of books, their arguments and flaws etc. in a short space of time. Of particular relevance here:
    • - [Introduction in _Modern Chinese Literary Thought _(Denton)](http://search.lib.cam.ac.uk/?itemid=|cambrdgedb|1646648) - [A Review of Recent Scholarship on the May Fourth Movement (Ip, Hon & Lee)](http://www.jstor.org/stable/3181303) - [Ideology and Theory in the Study of Modern Chinese Literature: An Introduction (Link)](http://www.jstor.org/stable/189326) - [_The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century_ (McDougall and Louie)](http://search.lib.cam.ac.uk/?itemid=|cambrdgedb|1374258) - [Ohio State University Modern Chinese Literature](http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/denton2/courses/c763/c763.htm) - you can get some summary from the structure, but what's really nice here are all the PDFs made publicly available. - [Very short summaries](http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dporter/sampler/sampler.html#ml) of various modern Chinese literature texts
  • [MCLC back issues](http://mclc.osu.edu/jou/mclcon.htm) - reading the article summaries can be very useful for quick understanding / essay points. The article themselves should be on JSTOR too. Some helpful ones:

    • Modern Chinese Literature: 現代文學


    Contact me: mhg@eastasiastudent.net

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