Description
Post-Mandarin offers an engaging look at a cohort of Vietnamese intellectuals who adopted European fields of knowledge, a new Romanized alphabet, and print media-all of which were foreign and illegible to their fathers. This new generation of intellectuals established Vietnam's modern anticolonial literature.
The term "post-mandarin" illuminates how Vietnam's deracinated figures of intellectual authority adapted to a literary field moving away from a male-to-male literary address toward print culture. With this shift, post-mandarin intellectuals increasingly wrote for and about women.
Post-Mandarin illustrates the significance of the inclusion of modern women in the world of letters: a more democratic system of aesthetic and political representation that gave rise to anticolonial nationalism. This conceptualization of the "post-mandarin" promises to have a significant impact on the fields of literary theory, postcolonial studies, East Asian and Southeast Asian studies, and modernist studies.
About the Author
Ben Tran is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and English at Vanderbilt University.
Reviews
"Post-Mandarin is a rich, rewarding, and ground-breaking study of a key moment in the development of modern Vietnamese literature." -- -Christopher GoGwilt Fordham University "A lucid, well-conceived, and elegantly written monograph that presents a literary history and analysis of the "post-mandarin" aesthetic modernism in colonial Vietnam, rethinking modernity alongside, yet beyond, the customary European model." -- -Lisa Lowe Tufts University
Book Information
ISBN 9780823273140
Author Ben Tran
Format Paperback
Page Count 192
Imprint Fordham University Press
Publisher Fordham University Press