Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- National Character, Exemplarity, and World Literature -- Figuring a Literary Humanity in (and through) Theory -- Aesthetics and the Institution of Modern Chinese Literature -- The Location(s) of Theory in Modern Chinese Literary Studies -- The Two (post-) Metaphysical Trajectories in the Formation of Modern Chinese Literature: Toward a Clear Defi nition of "Man" -- Chapter One The Trials of Chinese Literary Realism -- The In(ter)vention of Chinese Modernism -- The Political Unconscious of the "Limits of Realism" -- The Stillbirth of Chinese Literary Realism -- Totalization and Violence in Lu Xun's "Master Discourse of Realism" -- Chapter Two Lu Xun's Ah Q as "Gruesome Hybrid" -- Lu Xun, Zarathustra, and the Type (dianxing) -- Ah Q, Ressentiment and Typology -- The Biographer's (and Our) Ah Q and Arthur Smith's Character/Soul/Bild-less Chinese -- Chapter Three The Aesthetic Critique of Modernity in Chinese Marxism, New Criticism, and Adorno -- C. T. Hsia, Human Evil, and the "Living Image of Man" -- Marxist and Southern Agrarian Criticism on the Cultural Predations of Positivism -- Concrete Universality and the Critique of Aesthetic Modernity in Cai Yi and John Crowe Ransom -- Cai Yi, Adorno, and Aesthetic Universality -- Chapter Four Global/Modern Figurations of the Type in Cai Yi, Heidegger, and Whitman -- The Heideggerian Type, Alfred Rosenberg's "Race Form," and (para-)Humanity -- Cai Yi and the Dialectical Materialist Artistic Type -- Cai Yi's Typical Humanity and Walt Whitman's Literary Eidaesthetics of the Nation -- Chapter Five Aesthetics and Desire in Yang Mo's Song of Youth -- The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Revolutionary Bildungsroman -- Ero(poli)tics of the Text -- Image, Knowledge, and Revolutionary Formation (Bildung) -- Conclusion.

Conclusion Exemplarity in Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan's Hongyan: From White Terror to "Red Classic" -- Revisioning the History of Hongyan -- Revolutionary Insurrection and Universality -- The Aporia of Modern Chinese Revolutionary Subjectivity -- Conclusion -- Glossary of Chinese Terms -- Bibliography -- Index.