Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism : From Russia, with Squalor

Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism shows that early twentieth century Chinese writers drew upon Russian texts about the socially downtrodden to describe poverty, in a bid to enrich Chinese culture by creating a syncretic new realism.Modern Chinese realist writers turned to the topic of material poverty-peasants suffering from famine, exploited urban laborers, homeless orphans-to convey their sense of textual poverty and national backwardness.The combination of a radically new subject matter and experimentation with diverse literary resources, indigenous and foreign, generated major innovations in narrative technique.Depicting poverty allowed writers to revolutionize the nascent forms of modern Chinese narrative, innovating strategies of representing the nation, the social other, time, and space, while problematizing their deployment of squalor for aesthetic purposes.This book examines why Russian literature, itself long preoccupied with a problem of belatedness vis-à-vis Western Europe,