There is something to be said for this reading; indeed, it dominated academic study until the early 1990s. But the equation of modern Chinese literature with politics is also something of a ­straitjacket. Since at least the Cold War, the stain of ideology has adversely affected its perception in the West, where nonspecialist reviewers and readers have often characterized 20th-century Chinese writing as preoccupied with didactic political messages, to the exclusion of stylistic or psychological complexity. Like literature everywhere, however, that of modern China expresses a confounding mix of history, humanism and aesthetics; it has always done far more than reflect its political context. And although this worthwhile anthology asserts the primacy of the political story, it also allows alternative literary visions to glimmer through.

Drawing on the work of numerous translators, “The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature” is divided into three parts, devoted to the Republican Era (1911-49), the Revolutionary Era (1949-76) and the Post-Mao Era (1976 to the present). The first section ­anthologizes, among others, the authors of the first half of the 20th century who form the “patriotic canon” of modern Chinese writers (Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Ba Jin). Associated with the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s (which, alongside other aims, sought to create a serious literature in vernacular Chinese that would forge a vigorous national consciousness), their writing denounced the poverty, injustice and political chaos that afflicted the country from the late 19th century onward. The anthology’s second section showcases a handful of “revolutionary” works, including a model opera, a peasant writer’s short story and Mao’s own unabashedly classical poetry. The third section can be read as a creative reaction against the strictures of the Mao era, and of the Cultural Revolution in particular. Here we encounter the return of ambiguity and nuance in the poetic language of Bei Dao; Mo Yan’s ­taboo-busting fiction, packed with sex and gore; and the linguistic playfulness of Ma Yuan and Che Qianzi.

Image Xiao Hong

Huang’s selections also accommodate literary innovators who challenge the idea of modern Chinese literature as dominated by politics. Our understanding of writers celebrated for their sociopolitical commentary, meanwhile, is complicated by the inclusion of works that are whimsical and intimate as well as those engaged in fierce denunciations of Chinese society. Rather than include Yu Dafu’s best-known short story, “Sinking” (a melodramatic first-person narration by a Chinese student in Japan in the early 1920s that blurs an individual’s sexual inferiority complex into a collective sense of national humiliation), Huang chooses a movingly low-key essay about Yu’s struggles as a penniless writer in Shanghai. Commendably, Huang himself has translated several of the more recherché entries.

In the pre-1949 section, the standout is an excerpt from the novel “Tales of Hulan River” by Xiao Hong, a loosely left-wing female writer who died tragically young in 1942, when she was only 30 years old. Xiao Hong’s close male contemporary, Ba Jin, achieved much greater fame in his lifetime for his emotional denunciations of Confucianism in novels like “Family,” but Xiao Hong’s laconically detailed account of local superstition in her birthplace in China’s frozen northeast is much more effective as an attack on the mindless inhumanity of Chinese conservatism: “Spring, summer, autumn, winter — the seasonal cycle continues inexorably, and always has since the beginning of time. Wind, frost, rain, snow; those who can bear up under these forces manage to get by; those who cannot must seek a natural solution. This natural solution is not so very good, for these people are quietly and wordlessly taken from this life and this world.”