AAS 2014 Highlight: The first English-language study on Lu Xun’s Yecao
“The connection between his fiction and prose poetry is by no means arbitrary,
as Lu Xun himself once likened the inspiration for his short stories to that of his prose poems,
differing more in length than kind”
– Nicholas A. Kaldis, The Chinese Prose Poem: A Study of Lu Xun’s Wild Grass (Yecao)
An excerpt from the book:
Fantasizing himself as a vulture longing to eat her corpse or willing to commit suicide for her sake, he implies that accepting alms would be tantamount to wishing for “her destruction” (她的滅亡), or invoking the destruction of himself and “all other things outside of her” (她以外的一切). This morbid variation on the Madonna-whore complex vocalizes a bifurcated desire to either consume a living woman[’s corpse] (a macabre but apparently sexual metaphor) or destory all threats to her, himself included, apparently to maintain [his patriarchal notion of] her virtue. But the passer-by would not wish to see her meet up with either outcome because women (the feminine plural character 她們 tamen [they] is used) “probably would not want it that way” (大概總不願意有這樣的境遇). His spontaneously imagined relationship to this girl and other women is both sadistically sexual and masochistically chivalrous.
This book will be on display at Cambria Press booth #302 (right in front of the exhibit hall entrance)
at the 2014 Association of Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference in Philadelphia,
but you don’t have to wait–read more now through the Cambria Free Preview.
MEET THE AUTHOR! Dr. Kaldis will be speaking at the AAS book launch session (room 407) on Friday (March 28) at 7:30 p.m.
*This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series (general editor: Victor H. Mair).
Check out the 2014 Cambria Press Asian studies catalog and download the booklist for your librarian.
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