Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture

Abstract

Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture Andrew F. Jones Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Contents, notes, appendix, glossary of terms, index, images. 259 pp. $49.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780674047952Andrew F. Jones's fascinating and beautifully written book should be read by all those interested in childhood, toys, fairy tales, and the discourse of development and its vernacularization in specific cul tural contexts. A specialist in modern Chinese culture, Jones's earlier book, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age, was a study of popular music and media culture in Shanghai during the first decades of the twentieth century (Jones 2001). In Developmental Fairly Tales, Jones again weaves together a study of Chinese modernity- this time using one of its most important intellectuals, Lu Xun. This book is as much a monograph on Lu Xun as it is a dynamic examination of his generation's evolutionary thinking. An emphasis on the pedagogical function of culture in its vernacular forms-newspaper article, popular magazine, children's premier, film, and fairy tale-supplies the intellectual link between Jones's earlier work and the current book.The author's effort to restore the child and the beast to a central place in the narration of Chinese modernity is not without precedents. For Lu Xun and his generation, writing about the child and the beast was writing about the endangered nation. Chinese intellectuals and educators used the child and the beast as instruments to think through the issue of development. Jones joins a long tradition of intellectual inquiry into the underprivileged and the disadvantaged, a move that simultaneously confirms and challenges the evolutionary thinking prevalent in the history and historiography of modern Chinese culture. Jones's consistent attention to "the folk" is another manifestation of such interest, as he points out in a recent interview which appeared in a November 30, 2011, issue of New Books in East Asian Studies about his next project, a return to popular music and media culture in Maindesire land China and Taiwan in the 1960s.In defining "development" as "a way of knowing, narrating, and attempting to manage processes of radical historical change" (p. 3) and situating the child and the beast at the center of such processes, Jones radically revises our understanding of modern Chinese cultural development by highlighting vernacular materials (such as children's literature) and their complex engagement with the dilemmas of colonial modernity in China. The crisis of agency, as Jones points out, runs through Lu Xun and his generation's grappling with developmentalist thought (p. …