This book aims to open up dialogues for better understanding emergent cultural forms that reflect social instability arising from the global spread of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism, and to constitute the foundation of an innovative history of Sinophone literature. It does not only take into account the complicated survival struggles of the subjects of Mao's revolution including refugee-immigrants turned colonial subjects, but also the interaction between literature and the arts as well as between human and nonhuman agents (place, material culture, nature, etc.). It aims to offer an interdisciplinary approach to Sinophone culture, literature and cinemas coming-of-age-ness by covering in-depth textual and cinematic analyseses engaging with Chinese film theories, genre studies, narratology and aesthetics, as well as literary and cultural theories that focus on cultural history and critiques of modernity in the Chinese-speaking world. Furthermore, it aims at broadening the genre of Sinophone coming-of-age narratives by looking at so far understudied groups such as the southbound literati, and outlooks such as the critical evaluation of Asian neoliberal capitalist childhood experiences in literature, film, print or visual media since the 1950s in broader Sinophone regions (e.g. Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia). With the inclusion of twelve original articles by established and emerging international scholars, this volume offers critical reading of literary and cinematic texts produced in China and Sinophone communities between the 1950s and 2010s. The articles portray the lineage and mutations of the Chinese Bildungsroman, providing insights into the tensions between individual and society; nation and the world; and the multiple social, ecological, and virtual realities of recent decades. Concerned with how coming-of-age narratives have persistently returned and evolved over time, the book addresses themes such as family and social change; gender, class, and generational divides, local/global politics, and the ecological and posthuman turns in Chinese/Sinophone culture. It offers a fresh look on how the transnational and transgenerational journeys of Bildungsroman and coming-of-age narratives continuously transform and reinvigorate generic conventions, to explore adolescence as a formative social force and aesthetic experience in Chinese/Sinophone literature and film.
Reviews
"This volume investigates the Chinese Bildungsroman from the global sixties to the precarious present, and from intensely humanist dreams to dark visions of the end of the Anthropocene. Drawing on an exciting range of literary and cinematic perspectives on what it means to come of age in the Sinosphere, the contributors to this wide-ranging book explore adolescence as both a privately vivid time of life and a potent force for systemic change." Margaret Hillenbrand, Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture, Oxford University
"A significant contribution to Sinophone and comparative studies, this interdisciplinary volume powerfully illustrates how Bildungsroman and coming-of-age narratives across literature and film confront historical trauma, ideological upheaval, environmental degradation, and global precarity. It offers a compelling reflection on adolescence as a site of resistance, remembrance, and reinventionshedding new light on the culture and politics of growing up in a fractured, interconnected world." Weijie Song, Associate Professor in Chinese Literature, Rutgers University
Acknowledgements
Note on Romanizations and Translations
Introduction
SECTION I: The Global Sixties and Leftist Activism
1 The Socialist Bildungsroman and Global Youth: Wang Meng and Jack Kerouac
Wendy Larson
2 Growing Up in an Age of Turbulence: The Bildungsromane of Young Hong Kong
Writers in the Sixties Mary Shuk-han Wong
3 Abandoning Iowas Modernism: Wan Kin-lau Renounces His Bildung in the Cold
War Era Mung Ting Chung
SECTION II. Afterlives and Unstable Repositionings
4 Mapping and Contesting the Notion of Sinophone: The Coming of Age of Global
Chinese Literature Sheldon Lu
5 The Coming of Age of Hong Kong: Dung Kai-cheungs Celestial Creations and
the Works of Man: Vividness and Veracity Enoch, Yee-lok Tam
6 Coming of Age and Learning to Live (with Ghosts) in Borneos Rainforest
Alison M. Groppe
SECTION III. Screening Urban Precarity
7 Little Pinks, Shamate Kids, and the Involuted Generation: A Coming-of-Age
Portrait of Chinas Post-90s Generation Kiu-wai Chu
8 Sentimentality and the Capitalization of Humanity: On Anthony Chens Ilo
Ilo Pheng Cheah
9 Years of the Yearning Youth: Growth, Flows, and the Dilemma of Maturity in
Hong Kong Coming-of-Age Films Fiona Y. W. Law
SECTION IV. The Ecological and the Posthuman
10 Spectral Mappings: Coming of Age in Su Tongs Shadow of the Hunter Andrea
Riemenschnitter
11 Coming of Age in Post-urban Hong Kong: An Ecocritical Approach to
Land-writing and Land-filming Winnie L. M. Yee
12 Becoming a Cyborg: Female Coming of Age in Chen Qiufans Waste Tide Hua Li
Complete Bibliography
Index Keywords
Contributors
Andrea Riemenschnitter is professor em. of Modern Chinese Language and Literature, University of Zurich. Her most recent book is Sinophone Utopias. Exploring Futures Beyond the China Dream (2023, co-ed.). She has published in Archiv Orientalni, AS, ICCC, Interventions, JMLC, MCLC, Monumenta Serica, etc. Kiu-wai Chu is Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities and Chinese Studies at Nanyang Technological University. He is a National Humanities Center Fellow 2022-23. His research focuses on environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and contemporary cinema and visual art in China and broader Asia. Mung Ting Chung is Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Calgary. Her research interests include Hong Kong literature, Sinophone studies, and the cultural Cold War. Her first monograph, Writing Beyond Borders: Hong Kong Literary Production in the Early Cold War Era (tentative title), will be published by Brill.
