Can Xue
Interpretations
Interpretations
Listed below are only some of the works about Can Xue. If you know of other work that should be included in this selected bibliography, please contact the site's web master. Special thanks to Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center and Kirk Denton for permission to incorporate the center's bibliographic listings for Can Xue into this site.
Bachner, Andrea. "New Spaces for Literature: Can Xue and Helene Cixous on Writing." Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 3 (2005): 155–182.
Barlow, Tani, ed. In Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. [See p. 10 of introduction and Solomon article noted below.]
Bosha, Francis. "Ariyoshi Sawako, Mukoda Kuniko, and Can Xue : Three Modern Women Writers of Japan and China." The Journal of Kawamura Gakuen Woman's University 8, no. 1 (1997): 19–27.
Brent, Jonathan. "The Shining World of Can Xue." Music & Literature, No. 5 (2014): 275-277. [Brent first published Can Xue's books in the United States.]
Cadman, Julie. "Familiarity and the Narrative Ledge: A Review of I Live in the Slums, a Collection by Can Xue." Michigan Quarterly Review website, posted February 25, 2021.
Cai, Rong. "In the Madding Crowd: Self and Other in Can Xue's Fiction." China Information 11, no. 4 (Spring 1997): 41–57. Later reprinted as Chapter 4 in The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004.
Can Xue. "Literature Needs to Bring about Another Copernican Revolution." An essay written by the author from excerpts of an interview by Zheng Xiaolu, forthcoming in Shanghai Literature (上海文学).
Chen, Jianguo. "The Aesthetics of Transposition of Reality, Dream, and Mirror: A Comparative Perspective on Can Xue." Comparative Literature Studies 34, no. 4 (1997): 348–375.
———"Literary Imagination and the Politics of Memory: China." Review of National Literatures and World Report (1999): 58–73.
———"Against Silence: The Cultural Revolution and Literary Memory." MLA International Bibliography (2000): 163–181.
Chi, Pang-yuan, and David Der-wei Wang, eds. Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Deng, Xiaomang. "The Tenant of the Soul: On 'The Tenant of Room 801.'" Music & Literature, No. 5, 2014, pp. 292–297. [Short essay by Can Xue's brother, the philosopher Deng Xiaomang, on Can Xue's short story, "The Tenant of Room 801." The essay was translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, the translator of The Last Lover.]
Donatich, John. "Publishing The Last Lover." Music & Literature, No. 5, 2014, pp. 289–291. [Short essay by the publisher of Can Xue's The Last Lover.]
Donatich, John. "Can Xue and the Difficulties of Love." Yale Books Unbound, posted October 13, 2015. [Insightful essay on the force of love in Can Xue's The Last Lover by the publisher of the Yale University Press.]
Ducornet, Rikki. The Monstrous and the Marvelous. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1999. [Can Xue is discussed in the title chapter of this book of essays.]
Edwards, Louise. "Broadening Horizons: Representations of Women in Asia." Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 24 (1992). [Article includes commentary on Can Xue's Dialogues in Paradise]
Evans, Megan."Translating Instability: Adapting and Staging Madam X and Mister Q" (based on Can Xue's Five Spice Street). MCLC Resource Center (website), The Ohio State University. March 2015. [Essay considers the techniques used in staging of the story of Madam X and Mister Q based on Five Spice Street. The play was adapted and directed by the article's author. ]
Fan, Luo. 残雪与卡夫卡小说比较研究 Can Xue and Kafka's Stories: Comparative Research. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2006.
Foley, Todd. "A Breakthrough Performance: Being Human on Can Xue's Five Spice Street." Frontiers of Literary Studies in China. 10:4 (2016), pp. 598-622.
Goldblatt, Howard, ed. Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused: Fiction from Today's China. New York: Grove Press, 1995. [See p. xi of the introduction.]
Haddon, Rosemary. "Writing spirituality in the works of Can Xue: transforming the self." New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies. 13(2) (2011), 68-81.
Halfmann, Roman. ">Literature of the Soul<: Die Kafka-Rezeption der chinesischen Autorin Can Xue." Lili - Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 39, no. 154 (2009): 159–172.
———"'Literature of the Soul,' The Kafka Reception of the Chinese Author Can Xue." Orbis litterarum, vol:64 (2009): 478 -499.
Ho, Shuwei. "Madness in Modern Chinese Literature: Yu Hua and Can Xue." Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 11 (2000): 97–117.
Hong, Zicheng. A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Translated by Michael M. Day. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007. [See Chapter 22, "Fiction of the Second Half of the 1980s (B)."]
Huot, Claire. China's New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. [See Chapter 1.]
Innes, Charlotte. Foreword to the English translation of Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas by Can Xue. Translated by Ronald R. Janssen and Zian Zhang. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Press University, 1991.
Janssen, Ronald R. "Afterword: Can Xue's 'Attacks of Madness.'" In Dialogues in Paradise, translated by Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang, 163–173. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989.
Jing, Kaixuan. "Contemporary Chinese Fiction: Politics and Romance." Macalester International, Vol. 18, Volume 18, Issue 1 (2007).
Kerschen, Paul. "Sour, Salty, Bitter, Spicy, Sweet: On Five Spice Street." Music & Literature, No. 5, 2014, pp. 278–286. [One of the most extensive treatments of Five Spice Street.]
Larson, Wendy. Review of Xiaobin Yang's The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction. MCLC Resource Center Publication, 2004. [Larson talks about Yang's definition of Chinese postmodernism. Can Xue is discussed.]
———From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. [See pp. 199–200 on Yellow Mud Street as a radical deconstruction of the concept of work.]
Lau, Joseph S. M. "China Deconstructs: The Emergence of Counter-Tradition in Recent Chinese Writing." The Stockholm Journal of East Asian Studies 5 (1994): 25–35.
Lee, Lily Xiao Hong and A.D. Stefanowska, eds. Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, The Twentieth Century, 1912-2000. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2003. [See pp. 26-30, article by Wu Xiaoli, translated by Laura Long.]
Li, Tianming. "Writing Fiction for Vengeance: The Symbolic Meaning of Can Xue's 'Hut on a Hill.'" B.C. Asian Review 7 (1993).
———"A Tormented Soul in a Locked Hut: Can Xue's Stories." Master's thesis, University of British Columbia, 1994.
Li, Yinghong. "Nihilist Vision through Literary Subversion in Mainland Chinese Avant-garde Fiction: Two Cases: Nihilism of the Indifferent as Exemplified by Yu Hua and Nihilism of the Absurd as Exemplified by Can Xue." PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1998.
Lu, Tonglin. "Can Xue: What Is so Paranoid in Her Writing." In Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society, ed. Tonglin Lu, 175–204. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. Rpt. in Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction, 75–103. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
McCandlish, Laura. "Can Xue's Marginalized Vision." Honors thesis, Davidson College, 2002.
McDougall, Bonnie S., and Kam Louie. The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. [See section on Can Xue on pp. 409–410 in the chapter "Fiction: Exploring Alternatives." The author calls Can Xue one of the leading writers of the 'nightmare' school.]
———Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2003. [Can Xue is discussed in Chapter 11, "Literary Decorum or Carnivalistic Grotesque: Literature in the People's Republic of China after Fifty Years."]
Møller-Olsen, Astrid. "Sounding the Dream: Crosscultural Reverberations between Can Xue and Jorge Luis Borges." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Vol. 47, No. 4, 2020, 463-479.
Myles, Eileen. "Starvation and Suffering Also Get You High." The Paris Review, web article posted November 19, 2018. [A response to Can Xue's novel Love in the New Millennium.]
Pach, Nell. "The Magic Virtual Realism of Can Xue's The Last Lover." Music & Literature, An Arts Magazine. Posted October 2 2014.
Posborg, Susanne. "Can Xue: Tracing Madness." In Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture, ed. Wendy Larson and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, 91–98. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1993.
Qualls, Melissa Ann. "A Sojourn through Madness in 'The Embroidered Shoes' of Can Xue." Master's thesis, Truman State University, 1999.
Reismuller, Frantisek. "Early Short Stories And Novellas By Woman Writer Can Xue." Master's thesis, Charles University in Prague, 2011.
Rothfork, John. "Identities and Buddhism in Can Xue's Frontier." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, published on-line June 4, 2020.
Solomon, Jon Douglas. 從黑暗綻放生命的靈光」序殘雪小說集《黃泥街 "Brilliant Lifelight Piercing the Darkness: A Preface to Can Xue’s Novel Yellow Mud Street." 臺北：圓神，1987年），《上海文藝》1988年全文轉載。
———"Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy: Text and Context in Can Xue's Short Story 'The Skylight.'" Master's thesis, Cornell University, 1989. Note: Copyright is held by Jon Solomon with permission for individual use. This thesis was rewritten and published as "Taking Tiger Mountain: Cultural Critique in Can Xue's Fiction," in Modern Chinese Literature 4, nos. 1–2 (1989): 235–262. Reprinted in Tani Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in Modern China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). [The author was an early Can Xue scholar and assisted Can Xue in publishing her first works.]
Sommardal, Göran. "Kafkarummet: Den kinesiske K." Ord och Bild, (4-5), 1999, 158-73.
——— "Some Questions Concerning Husserl's Critizue of the Epistemology of Kant." Abstract of an article that looks at Can Xue's philosophical inquiry, 2021.
Spring, Declan. "Editing Blue Light in the Sky." Music & Literature, No. 5, 2014, pp. 287-288. [A short essay from the editor at New Directions who edited Can Xue's collection of short stories, Blue Light in the Sky.]
Stevenson, Simon. "Legending In Flagrante Delicto: The Short Fiction Of Can Xue." Short Fiction In Theory & Practice, 3.1: 77, 2013.
Wang, Ban. "The Sublime Subject of History and Desublimation in Contemporary Chinese Fiction." Comparative Literature 47 (1995): 330–353.
———The Sublime Figure of History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. [The final chapter, "The Angels of History: The Fantastic, Schizophrenic, and Grotesque," has readings of Can Xue's fiction as examples of the anti-sublime.]
Sze, Arthur, ed. Chinese Writers on Writing. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2010. [Can Xue’s essay “A Particular Sort of Story,” the afterword from Blue Light in the Sky, is reprinted. Can Xue is also discussed in the preface to the book.]
Wang, Meng. "On Dialogue in Heaven." Chinese Literature, Fiction, Poetry, Art (Winter 1989).
Wasmoen, Annalise Finegan. "From Automatic Writing to Artificial Intelligence: On Translating Can Xue's Fiction." Posted to the Yale University Press Blog, April 9, 2019.
Wedell-Wedellsborg, Anne. "Ambiguous Subjectivity: Reading Can Xue." Modern Chinese Literature 8, nos. 1–2 (1994): 7–20.
———"Haunted Fiction: Modern Chinese Literature and the Supernatural." International Fiction Review I32 (2005).
———"Inside the Outsider: The Reappearance in Chinese Literature of a Long Absent Type of Character." The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1988).
Wikipedia entry for Can Xue
Yang, Xiaobin. "Can Xue: Discursive Dystopias." In The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction, ed. Xiaobin Yang, 129–149. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
———"Can Xue: Ever-Haunting Nightmares." In The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avante-Garde Fiction, ed. Xiaobin Yang, 74–92. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
Ye, Liwen. "Cun zai kun jing zhong de 'tou yuan biao yan'-Lun Can Xue xian feng xie zuo zhong xu shu mo shi de shan bian." Yangtze River Academic 2 (2006): 41–47.
Yu, Yemuyang, Da Zuofumeijia, Qin Zuo. "Narration of Can Xue." Journal of Hainan Radio & TV University 3 (2002): 64–66.
Zha, Peide. "Modernism Eastward: Franz Kafka and Can Xue." B.C. Asian Review 5 (1991).
Zhang, Jian. "A Cross-Cultural Study of Story Transactions among Twelve College-Level Readers in the United States and the People's Republic of China." 1991." PhD thesis, Hofstra University, 1991.
———“Reading Transaction in Translation." Babel 43:3, 1997. [The author, who, along with Ronald R. Janssen, translated the first three collections of Can Xue stories available in English, analyzes her personal reading experience while translating Can Xue’s work.]
Zhong, Xueping. Masculinty Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000. [See especially pp.146–148 and pp. 150–151.]