A fascinating and valuable account of the rich literature emerging from one of China's most poignant, controversial, and understudied political campaigns. When millions of China's best and brightest young people were induced to 'volunteer' to relocate to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, they did their best to make sense of their unusual circumstances. Professor Cao's systematic and well-researched discussion ... Read moreof their writings makes the genre of 'educated youth literature' accessible to a Western audience for the first time.
Judith Shapiro, American University; author of Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China As an English-language catalogue of zhiqing fiction and criticism of both the fiction and the rustication experience, Zuoya Cao's Out of the Crucible stands unsurpassed.
Bert Scruggs, University of California, Davis
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews
Rather than offer a theoretical interpretation of the comprehensive reading she brings to ther study, Cao provides the reader with an extensive collection of plot-summaries and category or character specific observations. . . . For its attentive reconsideration of many points deemed settled by earlier historians and its informative reconstruction of the conditions under which late imperial books were published, this is a work no scholar of Chinese literature can afford to ignore.
Haun Saussy, Yale University
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews
Out of the Crucible is an extremely thorough study of the writing of the Chinese 'urban youth' generation about their experiences in the Chinese countryside during the rustication campaign that lasted from late 1968 to early 1979. A scholar who isalso a veteran of rustication and a practitioner of 'urban youth' fiction, Dr. Cao has balanced empathy for her subjects with critical rigor, and has produced the most comprehensive account so far available in English of an important body of Chinese literature...
Richard King, University of Victoria, Canada Out of the Crucible is an extremely thorough study of the writing of the Chinese 'urban youth' generation about their experiences in the Chinese countryside during the rustication campaign that lasted from late 1968 to early 1979. A scholar who is also a veteran of rustication and a practitioner of 'urban youth' fiction, Dr. Cao has balanced empathy for her subjects with critical rigor, and has produced the most comprehensive account so far available in English of an important body of Chinese literature.
Richard King, University of Victoria, Canada Show Less