Chinese Serial explores a major trope in Chinese literature-cannibalism-from its origins in the 14th-century Chinese novel and Lu Xun's influential deployment in the early-20th century, to the sublimations of Chinese political history and East-West encounter in the many Detective Dee television serials.

Beginning with one of the four classical Chinese novels, Monkey, and extending to modern and contemporary Chinese literature and television series, the ten chapters, referred to as courses, form a "feast" that offers something for various readers. Additionally, it engages with Taiwanese history and cultural production-from Wu Zhuoliu's Orphan of Asia to Yang Shuang-zi's Taiwan Travelogue-presenting a dialectical account of its continuities with Chinese literary traditions as well as its unassimilability into those traditions.

This book is timely and probes into the centuries-long Chinese “man-eat-man” tradition. It spans the 16th-century classic chapter novel Monkey, the turn-of-the-last-century Lu Xun and Wu Zhuoliu, the surreal horror of Yu Hua and Fruit Chan, the oc/cult in Detective Dee, Asian North American self-Orientalizing, Taiwan's Nipponophilia, and finally the Sino-noir of serial killers in TV series.