Twentieth-century Chinese literature has been characterized by an obsession with the future, an obsession that is often commented on but rarely scrutinized. Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation-building, and with the utopian visions propagated by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future thus understood has often been seen as a “destination” a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces the concept of “anticipation” as a le ... More

Twentieth-century Chinese literature has been characterized by an obsession with the future, an obsession that is often commented on but rarely scrutinized. Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation-building, and with the utopian visions propagated by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future thus understood has often been seen as a “destination” a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces the concept of “anticipation” as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture from the 1950s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Anticipation names the “future in the present,” the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds and that are often mediated by literary texts. Each of the book’s five chapters details how different modes of anticipation find expression in contemporary Chinese literature, with a focus on fictional genres. Each chapter explores how emotions such as hope and fear as well as ideas on “what may come next” find concrete expression in a variety of Chinese texts and institutional contexts, ranging from science fiction to translation journals and from modernist writing to environmental literature, with the aim of tracing overlooked continuities throughout the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, and thus refining our understanding of Chinese socialist and postsocialist literary modernity.