Enduring the Revolution: Ding Ling and the Politics of Literature in Guomindang China

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

An anarchist by temperament, the beautiful and talented Ding Ling attempted to find her way in the world alone. She had a few female friends and a few significant male others, but she rebelled against her family. Most importantly, she rebelled against the Chinese Communist Party to which she desperately hoped to belong. The first part of a comprehensive biography of the major 20th century Chinese author, Ding Ling, this work draws not only on her memoirs, but on numerous secondary sources, many of which have become available only in the last two decades.

Reviews

"Charles J. Alber has written a splendid study of Ding Ling, China's most prominent female writer of the revolutionary era. Beginning with an enticing Preface about how he came to the topic, Alber's book is exhaustively researched, measured in judgment, and well written. He has unearthed some fascinating incidents and quotes, and he gives a clear-eyed picture of the complex and far from angelic Ding Ling. Everyone interested in the Chinese Communist movement, its cultural policies, and its tragic evolution from liberation to repression will find Embracing the Revolution rewarding reading."-Ross Terrill author Mao, China in Our Time, and Madame Mao
"Ding Ling is already one of the most controversial and widely discussed Chinese writers of the twentieth century, male or female; Charles Alber's absolutely spellbinding book ups the ante for both her admirers and detractors. Alber's sober and authoritative evaluations of newly available written sources, supplemented by his own interviews of Ding Ling and other Chinese literary figures, unearth the fast-fading and persistently covered-over trails of a whole generation of China's communist writers. His eye for the telling detail may have brought us about as close as we can get to the inner worlds of authors who went to hell and back without ever achieving self-knowledge."-Jeffrey C. Kinkly Professor of History St. Johns University, New York
.,."offers an engrossing literary history of Ding Ling (1904-86, pseudonym of Jiang Wei, more often known as Jiang Bingzhi), from her childhood to the climactic mid-century point, when her novel in praise of Maoist land reform, The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (1949; Eng. tr., 1984), received a Stalin Prize....this book makes a significant contribution to modern Chinese literary history and its socio-political backdrop. All academic collections."-Choice
...offers an engrossing literary history of Ding Ling (1904-86, pseudonym of Jiang Wei, more often known as Jiang Bingzhi), from her childhood to the climactic mid-century point, when her novel in praise of Maoist land reform, The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (1949; Eng. tr., 1984), received a Stalin Prize....this book makes a significant contribution to modern Chinese literary history and its socio-political backdrop. All academic collections.-Choice
..."offers an engrossing literary history of Ding Ling (1904-86, pseudonym of Jiang Wei, more often known as Jiang Bingzhi), from her childhood to the climactic mid-century point, when her novel in praise of Maoist land reform, The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (1949; Eng. tr., 1984), received a Stalin Prize....this book makes a significant contribution to modern Chinese literary history and its socio-political backdrop. All academic collections."-Choice

Author Bio

CHARLES J. ALBER is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina.