AIMS

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture is a peer-reviewed, multi-disciplinary cultural studies journal. In addition to literary studies, MCLC publishes on a broad range of subjects from film to popular culture, to performance and visual arts, to architecture, to regional cultures, to print and material cultures. Our view of culture includes the elite and the popular, the visual and the literary, as well as the less "textual" culture of everyday life. The journal encourages the use of photographs, graphics, film or video stills.

We see it as a very important mission of the journal to communicate to those outside our field the globally-important issues involved in the culture of Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China. MCLC maintains a high scholarly standard in which cutting-edge views of modern Chinese culture, informed by critical theory, are articulated clearly and accessibly. With the growing importance of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in the world economy, the rise of Chinese nationalism and a Chinese military threat in East Asia, not to mention the emergence of a disturbing China-bashing in the West, this is a critical moment for China scholars to communicate their work to an expanded constituency, to challenge the way China is represented in the Western media, and to help a broad intellectual readership come to a deeper understanding of issues related to modernity and its cultural formations in China.

We also see it as part of our mission to introduce to a Western readership some of the excellent scholarship being published in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. We will therefore sometimes publish translations of work done by scholars working primarily in the Chinese language.