Detecting Chinese Modernities: Rupture and Continuity in Modern Chinese Detective Fiction (1896-1949)

Abstract

<p>This book historicizes the two stsges in the development of Chinese detective fiction and disucusses the rupture and conintuity in the cultural transsactions, mediations and appropriations that occurred when the genre of detective fiction traveled to China during the first half of the twentieth century. It identifies two divergent, or even opposite strategies ofr appropriating Western detective fiction during teh late Qing and the Republican periods. It further argues that these two periods in the domestication of detective fiction were also connected by shared emotions. Both periods expressed ambivalent and sometimes contradictory views regarding Chinese tradition and Western modernity.</p>