Fin-de-siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911.

• Author: Williams, Philip F.
• Position: Review

By DAVID DER-WEI WANG. Stanford: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997. Pp. 433. $49.50.

As the first full-length survey of late Qing fiction by a single author in English, David Der-wei Wang's Fin-de-siecle Splendor is a major contribution to scholarship on late imperial and twentieth-century Chinese fiction. Wang cogently argues that late Qing fiction is considerably more innovative and "modern" than many literary historians and critics have heretofore acknowledged, even if he sometimes understates the degree to which scholars in the field have come to view late Qing fiction as a dynamic and significant body of work (p. 313). Perhaps most importantly, Wang provides informative and often insightful readings of numerous individual novels and story cycles, some of which have seldom been discussed, particularly in Western-language scholarship. Wang also brings in much relevant social and cultural history along the way, and concludes by pointing to a number of interesting affinities between late Qing novels and contemporary Chinese fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, such as motifs connected with chivalry, exposes of the wealthy and powerful, alluringly illicit infatuations, and futuristic fantasy.

Less edifying features of Splendor include the highly speculative nature of Wang's ascription of a "profoundly post-modern respectability" to late Qing fiction, his neo-Freudian schema positing the return of late-Qing "repressed modernities" in contemporary fiction, and his poststructuralist antipathy for literary mimesis as the Pandora that supposedly caused practically all the faults of the May Fourth fiction of the 1920s and 1930s (more likely "culprits" are unbridled romanticism and nuance-obliterating ideological fervor). And while Splendor's bibliographical apparatus satisfies the relatively modest standards still in place for twentieth-century Chinese literary studies, its periodic gaps in information about the novels' various editions and dates of serialization and publication require pre-modern fiction specialists and other exacting scholars to consult scholarly reference works like Dolezelova-Velingerova's A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature, 1900-1949, vol. 1: The Novel (1988).

Before grappling with Splendor, readers unfamiliar with late-Qing fiction could develop a more coherent understanding of its qualities by first turning to a less free-wheeling study like Chen Pingyuan's Zhongguo ershishiji xiaoshuo shi, 1897-1916 (1989), Milena...