In historical China a monster referred to as Taowu used to be recognized for either its vicious nature and its strength to work out the earlier and the long run. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until eventually it turned identifiable with background itself. because the 17th century, fictive debts of background have accommodated themselves to the huge nature of Taowu. relocating easily around the whole twentieth-century literary panorama, David Der-wei Wang delineates the numerous meanings of chinese language violence and its literary manifestations. taking into consideration the campaigns of violence and brutality that experience rocked generations of Chinese—often within the identify of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude—this booklet locations its arguments alongside comparable axes: heritage and illustration, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers sleek chinese language heritage as a posh of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and private articulations of bygone and ongoing occasions. His dialogue levels from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of starvation and hunger to the expertise of crime and punishment.
