New Books In Literary Studies

Henrietta Harrison‘s new book is the work of a gifted storyteller. In its pages, the reader will find Boxers getting drunk on communion wine, wolf apparitions, people waking up from the dead, ballads about seasickness, and flying bicycles. You will also find a wonderfully rich account of three centuries of Chinese history. The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (University of California Press, 2013) explores the modern history of a single Catholic town in Shanxi called Cave Gully by weaving together some of the most important tales and memories of its inhabitants. Through this very local story of lived religious practice, Harrison challenges dominant global histories of Christianity. In contrast to narratives that tell a story of a Christian religion that was alien to Chinese contexts and acculturated or adapted in order t o compensate for this incommensurability, Harrison’s book instead shows the significant commonalities between Christianity and Chinese reli