"Postsocialist Modernity is an engaging and well-written analysis that employs an array of primary sources to illustrate the ways literature, culture, and cinema connect to national transformation in an international context. Additionally, McGrath provides accurate and helpful translations of Chinese cultural terminology affiliated with this particular era. The book is strongly recommended to researchers, graduate students, upper-division undergraduates, and anyone interested in contemporary Chinese cinema, literature, and culture." - Yilian Liao (China Review International) "This thoughtful...study explores facets of Chinese culture resulting from China's recent transition from a socialist to a primarily market economy . . . Addressing a select group of texts, including commercial and avant-garde films and literature, McGrath shows that despite China's rapid rise in the global economy the cultural products of this period display a more hesitant, anxious attitude toward modernity." —CHOICE "This clearly written, engaging study of literature, film, debate and theory in contemporary culture beings with the insight that postsocialist Chinese modernity must be understood in the context of global modernity and, more specifically, the global capitalist system." - China Quarterly "This timely, informative study is remarkable in its narrative flow and clarity of argument. McGrath clearly delineates both the problems with market-driven cultural production and the pluralistic gains in freedom and openness by self-initiated, enterprising artists and writers." - Ban Wang (Stanford University) "This is the most lucid, engaging, and theoretically acute account of contemporary Chinese cultural production to have emerged in recent years from the Western academy." - Andrew F. Jones (University of California, Berkeley)