Both as an intermediary to Western culture and as a cultural force in itself, Japan had a significant impact on the development of modern Chinese literature. However, for the most part, the links of this Sino-Japanese literary relationship has only just begun to receive scholarly attention, making this book's exploration of Japan's role in shaping Chinese cultural modernity an important addition to the literature. By comparing and contrasting what appear to be similar narrative modes between the shishosetsu and work coming out of the Creation Society, Keaveney explores how Chinese writers both appropriated and reconceptualized this Japanese approach. By letting their work retain both self-referentiality and articulations of social concerns, the Chinese authors were able to make the form far more political than it ever was in the hands of Japanese writers.

Christopher T. Keaveney is an Associate Professor of Japanese at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. His articles, published in Sino-Japanese Studies and the online journal E-ASPAC, revolve around cultural relations between Japan and China in the prewar period.

"Chris Keaveney's new book marks an important achievement in the development of modern Sino-Japanese studies. By examining the impact of a literary form first developed in Japan on a community of innovative writers in China of the 1920s, he takes a long way toward understanding the profound cultural interaction between Chinese and Japanese writers early in the last century. It is one thing to assert such a linkage, but Keaveney's accomplishment is actually to demonstrate it in such rich and fine colors. Both sides of the equation are now much better understood. "
--Joshua A. Fogel, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Although many have recognized the importance of study in Japan and of the modern Japanese fiction they read there on shaping the literary imaginations of China's first generation of modern writers, The Subversive Self is the first study in English to explore the depth and the contours of this influence. This book is a very significant and highly welcome contribution to the comparative study of modern East Asian literatures. It richly deserves the attention of scholars of both China and Japan, of Asian literatures, and of Comparatists in general."
-- Robert E. Hegel, Washington University

"The May Fourth coterie of writers marks what is arguably the most disjunctive redirection in the long meandering flow of the Chinese literary narrative. Chris Keaveney, with nuance and imagination, measures the transformative pressure of identifiable Japanese cultural currents on what is to become a wholesale revolution in the Chinese language and its literary forms, and ironically, on the self- representation of the fervent patriots who would contest the Chinese
identity in order to save it."
--Roger T. Ames, University of Hawai'i