While many critics focus on the social, cultural, and political meanings of Asian American literary texts, some scholars turn to the significance of their forms and aesthetic values, wishing to end binary opposition between content and form in Asian American literary criticism. Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi point out in their anthology Forms and Transformation in Asian American Literature the limitations of socio-political oriented Asian American literary criticism that reduces literary texts to either assimilation or resistance to dominant ideologies while ignoring the author’s deliberate negotiation with literary conventions of mainstream American literature. This “subversive and creative interactions with dominant cultural discourses” makes “intervention” possible.6 The aesthetic value of Asian American texts is also the focus of Rocfo G. Davis and Sue-Im Lee’s Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, in which they argue that “the study of the aesthetic is not a non-Asian American activity” and is historically and politically contingent.7
Similarly, Chineseness has been imagined nationally and transnationally in the writings from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as a result of the complicated political situations across the Taiwan Strait. There is a sense of nativism shown by the strong desire to construct some national literary and cultural “origin” to go back to. For the Chinese critics who have been researching on modernity as Western import, the publications on fiction of Ming and Qing Dynasties mean a possible indigenous input in the formation of Chinese modernity. Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature , edited by Wilt L. Idema, Wai-yee Li, and Ellen Widmer, argues that the writings of early Qing Dynasty responded to the traumatic fall of the Ming Empire and the subsequent rule of a foreign ethnicity (the Manchus).8 For David Der-wei Wang and Wei Shang, however, this drastic shift of dynasties, while traumatic, was also an opportunity for the Chinese national culture to redefine itself and for Chinese intellectuals to revive their authorities as authors under new circumstances, as presented in Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: from the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond.9