Introduction to the English Translation

Abstract

In 2010, Cai Xiang’s Revolution and Its Narratives [Geming/ Xushu] was published in China.1 It immediately garnered positive reviews (as well as a few politically motivated attacks) and became one of the most talked about scholarly books of the year. Roundtables were organized to discuss its challenges to convential scholarship and workshops convened to explore its many strands of inquiry. The translators decided soon after that this was precisely the kind of book that is still quite rare in Englishlanguage scholarship on modern socialist Chinese literature. Its major topic—the relationship among Chinese narratives of revolution, modernity, and socialism in the Maoist period— generally has been dismissed in Englishlanguage studies of modern Chinese literature. In the few exceptions, the discussions often reduce the cultural to the political, neglecting the complex literary and aesthetic aspects of the work in favor of assumed transparently politicalideological readings, which amounts to the same thing as a dismissal. Cai Xiang’s book argues otherwise and thus presents a potential map for future research. It is, in short, an entirely new