First published in 1961, and reissued in new editions several times, this is the pioneering, classic study of 20th-century Chinese fiction. The book covers some 60 years, from the Literary Revolution of 1917 through the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. C. T. Hsia, Prof. Emeritus of Chinese at Columbia Univ., examines the major writers from Lu Hsun to Eileen Chang and representative works since 1949 from both mainland China and Taiwan. The first serious study of modern Chinese fiction in English, this book is also the best study of its subject available. Not only the specialist, but every reader who is interested in China or in literature will find it of interest. Hsia's astute insights and graceful writing make the book enjoyable as well as deeply edifying.

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Taiwan is still seen by many as an oriental military dictatorship, tainted by the imposition of a Kuomintang party-state which had lost the civil war in China to the Communists in 1949. And Taiwanese politics are often regarded as peripheral to the study of modern China. Yet exciting political developments have taken place since the mid-1980s; Taiwan has emerged from dictatorship to become, in the early 1990s, a state with an increasingly democratic orientation. When, in the late 1950s, the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek settled down in Taiwan and accepted that it was unlikely to recover the Chinese mainland by force, it turned to "soft authoritarianism". But in 1986 Chiang Ching-kuo, then President, made the fateful decision to end the long-standing ban on an effective opposition. Taiwan still has some way to go, but in the general election of December 1991 it passed the point of no return to become a democracy of a kind recognisable in the West, thus challenging earlier assumptions that liberal democracy and Chinese culture are incompatible. It also raises the question whether the Kuomintang party-state's experience over four decades in accommodating socio-economic changes in Taiwan holds any lessons for the Communist party-state across the Straits. Taiwan's move to a prosperous, stable and increasingly democratic system under ethnic Chinese rule must present a challenge to the leadership on the Mainland and serve as a model for many people there. These important issues highlight the need for closer study of Taiwan, which needless to say is an important subject of study in its own right. This volume has been written to meet this need, and at the same time to disperse out-of-date conceptions still prevailing. It is an international collaborative effort by the world's leading specialists on various aspects of Taiwan's political development, from Taiwan itself and several other countries.

A map of the mutual influence of Bloomsbury, the Crescent Moon Society, and modernism in English and Chinese culture Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes traces the romance of Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf, and Ling Shuhua, a writer and painter Bell met while teaching at Wuhan University in China in 1935. Relying on a wide selection of previously unpublished writings, Patricia Laurence places Ling, often referred to as the Chinese Katherine Mansfield, squarely in the Bloomsbury constellation. In doing so, she counters East-West polarities and suggests forms of understanding to inaugurate a new kind of cultural criticism and literary description. Laurence expands her examination of Bell and Ling's relationship into a study of parallel literary communities—Bloomsbury in England and the Crescent Moon group in China. Underscoring their reciprocal influences in the early part of the twentieth century, Laurence presents conversations among well-known British and Chinese writers, artists, and historians, including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, G. L. Dickinson, Xu Zhimo, E. M. Forster, and Xiao Qian. In addition, Laurence's study includes rarely seen photographs of Julian Bell, Ling, and their associates as well as a reproduction of Ling's scroll commemorating moments in the exchange between Bloomsbury and the Crescent Moon group. While many critics agree that modernism is a movement that crosses national boundaries, literary studies rarely reflect such a view. In this volume Laurence links unpublished letters and documents, cultural artifacts, art, literature, and people in ways that provide illumination from a comparative cultural and aesthetic perspective. In so doing she addresses the geographical and critical imbalances—and thus the architecture of modernist, postcolonial, Bloomsbury, and Asian studies—by placing China in an aesthetic matrix of a developing international modernism.