The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature: Writings from the Mainland in the Long Twentieth Century is an
anthology of
Chinese literature edited by Yunte Huang and published in 2016 by
W. W. Norton & Company. Huang, a professor of English at the
University of California, Santa Barbara,[1] described the book as a "search for the soul of modern China" in the introduction.[2]
Contents
The book is 600 pages long and has works spanning about 100 years until its publishing date, with almost 50 authors represented.[3] The works were translated by multiple people.[1]
The works were placed in three sections: the Republican Era which spans from 1911 to 1949 and includes works from the
New Culture Movement; the Revolutionary Era, spanning 1949 to 1976; and the Post-Mao Era, which has works since 1976. The portions of the book post 1990 are heavily focused on
poetry and have less emphasis on
urban fiction.[1]
Julia Lovell of The New York Times wrote that "it’s heartening to see a serious publisher, one whose list is geared to the general reader, invest in an anthology that manages to combine the established canon with less-well-known selections."[1] She argued that the book should have included works by Eileen Chang, and that male writers were represented too heavily in this anthology of modern Chinese writing.[1]
^Huang, Yunte (2016). "Acknowledgments". The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature: Writings from the Mainland in the Long Twentieth Century.
New York City: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. xi–xii.
ISBN978-0-393-35380-8.