A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature

Hong Zicheng has been a professor of contemporary Chinese literature in the Chinese Department at Peking University since 1961. His most recent monograph is a revised edition of The History of Contemporary Poetry in China (1993, 2005), and he is also the director of the Contemporary Chinese Literature Institute at Peking University.

Scholars and students in the fields of Chinese literature, Chinese Studies ('sinology'), comparative literature and modern Chinese history. Also ideal for readers who are interested in tracking developments in mainland Chinese scholarship.

“There is no doubt that this volume, along with the Humanities in China Library series it inaugurates, should serve as a model for further translations of influential Chinese-language scholarship in years to come.” - Rossella Ferrari, SOAS, University of London, The China Quarterly

"Hong (Peking Univ.) offers an excellent, dual-purpose book: it serves as both a textbook and a comprehensive history of Chinese literature from the 1940s to 1996...Highly recommended."
- Choice

"...[A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature's] significance is the scope of its overview of mainland Chinese fiction, poetry, prose, and aspects of theater through the mid-1990s in their documented institutional and critical context... Hong's history is well documented, with annotated citations of both criticisms from the time the works were published and from more recent scholars of the contemporary period, especially Huang Ziping and Zhu Zhai. There is welcome attention to a range of valuable topics, from institutional structures, biographical notes, translations of foreign literature and other texts available through the restricted "internal distribution" (neibu) system of publication, unofficial, underground texts of the Cultural Revolution era, and so forth... [Translator] Michael M. Day's translation greatly enhances the value of Hong's book as a reference text by adding a bibliography, glossary, and index and shifting Hong's endnotes to footnotes. [This text is] a solid and comprehensive survey that will stand as an important reference and source for new scholarship... [and] could provide a centerpiece for an engaging and productive course on the field."
- Edward Gunn, Cornell University, MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September 2008)

"Hong's panoramic history of contemporary Chinese literature, now in English translation for the first time after its many printings in Chinese, will be indispensable for both teaching and research...Its thorough and wide-ranging coverage from 1949 to 1999 touches upon many fascinating and understudied texts in that history, which can be points of entry for students and scholars of contemporary China to further their researches."
Liang Luo, University of Kentucky, China Review International Vol. 16, No. 4 (2009)