Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam

By Ben Tran

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 082327313X
• ISBN13: 9780823273133
• Release Date: January 2017
• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.1"