This collection of thirteen articles by eleven contributors aims at a method to reconsider the literary history of Republican-era China through original observations on the nature and role of literary groups, engaging the sociology of culture introduced by Pierre Bourdieu and more recent methods advanced by Michel Hockx. At a minimum, Literary Societies of Republican China provides a broad framework for studying the literary field of the era by directing attention to groupings across the political and cultural spectrum, incorporating not only “New Literature,” but also writers devoted to more conservative positions. Hence, there is a chapter on classical-style poetry groups by Shengqing Wu, on the Xueheng journal group by Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, and on Yuefeng magazine by Susan Daruvala, as well as a chapter on Mandarin Duck and Butterfly literature by Xueqing Xu. A number of contributors are veteran scholars of New Literature, among them Kirk Denton on the Hu Feng group; Lawrence Wang-chi Wong on the Crescent Moon Society and the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers; Michel Hockx on the Literary Association and, with Xiaobing Tang, on the Creation Society; Xiaomei Chen on Tian Han and the Southern Society; and Charles Laughlin on Lin Yutang and the Analects group and the All-China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists.

Given that the book provides strong diachronic studies of what have been understood as individual groups, the editors' introduction focuses on a set of synchronic conclusions to counter simplistic notions of the significance of associations that have affected previous scholarship. This is somewhat at the expense of diachronic attention to the period as a whole. As the editors point out (p. 12), writers formed associations most often to acquire access to a publisher. They are less inclined to consider whether formal associations may have been more significant in the 1920s and early 1930s as the best means to create an adequate network to establish a presence and sustain a publication; however, from the early 1930s, more publishers felt increasingly assured of the viability of a group's project and more readily reached out to individual writers to offer them contracts as editors because of their previous editorial experience and existing networks. Such a transition in the early 1930s might be exemplified by the Xiandai group and the Analects group, from which leaders such as Shi Zhicun and Lin Yutang, respectively, were offered contracts as editors for magazines conceived by publishers themselves. Such a shift might explain why, in the chapters of the book devoted to the 1930s and 1940s, two associations discussed were extensions of political propaganda organizations as publishers, while the Lin Yutang group is presented in terms of genre rather than membership, the Yuefeng magazine is defined almost entirely by the editor's networking rather than any common grouping of contributors, and the Hu Feng group is defined by a variety of things, most importantly Hu Feng as a very controlling editor, successfully adopting the mantle of the deceased Lu Xun, with some funding from Communist Party sources.

Another major offering of the book is methodology, in which the chapters engage aspects of Bourdieu's sociology of culture and Hockx's insights in his Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), especially the horizontal reading across the contents of issues of periodicals as works in themselves. The most affirmative use of Bourdieu appears in Mark Miller's systematic attention to the Yusi Society, explicitly addressing Bourdieu's concepts. Writing about the Hu Feng group, Denton agrees that Bourdieu has much to offer but also notes that his concept of how writers adopt positions is flawed in “ignoring deeper literary/cultural epistemological factors (e.g. their view of the transformative power of writing, their elitist stance toward the people, the view of literature's relation to the world” (p. 456). Susan Daruvala's study of the Yuefeng journal goes the furthest in challenging Bourdieu's theory of the field as stable and homogenous, arguing that “interaction among agents is as important as the objective relationships between particular positions” (p. 341). A study of Xiandai magazine might also support this view. Even in studies that do not explicitly engage Bourdieu, there are insightful observations, as in Feuerwerker's thoughtful, well-researched discussion of what amounts to the “habitus” of the Xueheng group, how it both dovetailed and veered sharply away from Hu Shi, even though they all attended Ivy League universities at the same or nearly the same time, but accepted the influence of very different teachers. Gender is another approach that is considered, although it is primarily Xiaomei Chen's chapter on Tian Han's projects that develops this possibility, and the discussions in other chapters leave the associations as overwhelmingly a male activity. Altogether, the book is so rich in both empirical and methodological observations that it is a source that must be engaged in any historical consideration of literature as an institution of the Republican era.