Selected Short Stories of Shen Congwen
By Shen Congwen
1999
First Published
4.18
Average Rating
271
Number of Pages
Shen Congwen (1902?-1988) is one of modern China's great writers. He is also one of the finest Chinese prose stylists of all time. Literary critics and historians have offered several reasons for why Shen Congwen is a great writer. The foremost explanation is his power as a stylist. He could make the Chinese language beautiful. Some critics have praised Shen Congwen for creating characters with beautiful souls. Readers credit him with having described beautiful and fulfilling styles of life, even in materially primitive surroundings, that conjure up the "health and dignity" prized by the Crescent Moon writers. Other critics value Shen Congwen as a realist writer. He has written many works exposing the abuses of the military in the countryside, and the vanity of the urban bourgeoisie. Most of the short stories in this collection, typeset in bilingual format, reveal the plight and the strength of the common people. They were chosen from the period when Shen had already honed a fine writing style, and they were written about rural folks in his native region, and about people he knew from his daily life. There are contradictions between the "new" and the "old," and also between human values with enough integrity to nurture life, versus corruption that leads to the decline and death of a culture.
Avg Rating
4.18
Number of Ratings
38
5 STARS
50%
4 STARS
26%
3 STARS
16%
2 STARS
8%
1 STARS
0%
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Author
Shen Congwen
Author · 3 books
Shen Congwen (沈从文, December 28, 1902 – May 10, 1988), formerly romanized as Shen Ts'ung-wen, was one of the greatest modern Chinese writers, on par with Lu Xun. Regional culture and identity plays a much bigger role in his writing than that of other major early modern Chinese writers. He was known for combining the vernacular style with classical Chinese writing techniques. Shen is the most important of the "native soil" writers in modern Chinese literature... Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen\_Con...
