This is part of our accidental series on the Song, and this is also our second episode on the poetry of Wang Anshi (王安石). Today, we look at a ballad that Wang wrote upon the death of his wife and continue our debate about the merits of Wang. For the original poem, check here. Lee’s […]
This week, we decide, in the middle of doing the podcast, that the Song has so much interesting stuff going on during it that we have to make this series into a longer series. Today, we are going to tackle a single poem by Su Dongpo 苏东坡 (aka Su Shi 苏轼). The poem we are […]
This week, we have a Chinese Literature Podcast Supplement where we explore Jing Tsu’s fascinating exploration of the history of language in her book Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora.
On today’s podcast, we go all the way back to the Northern Song Dynasty, one of the highpoints of Chinese culture, but also a point in which consensus was breaking down. Infighting in the 1070’s began a process that would weaken China to the point which it could not face up against its external threats […]
Today’s podcast is an interesting poem that functions less as a beautiful poem but more a historical artifact. In 1793, the English Ambassador met with the Chinese Emperor. After their meeting, the emperor, Qianlong, wrote an interesting poem about the encounter. In today’s podcast, we dissect that poem. Below is also Lee’s English translation of […]
This week’s episode is a Supplement, where we will talk about China’s Good War, Rana Mitter’s latest book. Mitter is a historian, but a lot of the content he analyzes is literary or filmic. Mitter’s argument is that China today is trying to rethink World War II in a way that is advantageous to contemporary […]
In today’s podcast, we interview author Yang Huang about her new book looking at the intersection of China, the US, and the politics of family and gender. The book is titled My Good Son, and it is her third work of fiction. The book’s plot revolves around two father-son pairs, one Chinese, one American. In […]
Today, we dig back into a podcast recorded several years before but never before aired. The topic is Nie Zheng (聂政), a story in the biography of the assassins, in Sima Qian’s Shiji. The story may be one of the early predecessors to Kung Fu film and literature.
This is it, this is the end of our decade-by-decade exploration of Chinese Literature in the 20th Century. Lee explores Mo Yan, while Rob chooses Xi Chuan. Join them for the final episode in this series.
Today, the Chinese Literature Podcast asks the ultimate geopolitical question: Is Taiwan Chinese? Actually, we are looking at a book titled Is Taiwan Chinese, an anthropological study by Melissa Brown that examines how identity, Chineseness and ethnicity are constituted on both sides of the Taiwan Straits…that is just a fancy way of saying that identity is […]