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Yan Lianke is one of the most important, prolific, and controversial writers in contemporary China. This companion presents a collection of critical essays by leading scholars from around the world, organised into some of the key themes of his work: Mythorealism; Absurdity; and History, as well as the challenges to translating his work.
List of contents
Part I: Mythorealism & Censorship 1. Yan Lianke's Mythorealist Representation of the Country and the City
2. Building Chinese Reality with Language and Metaphor: From Socialist Realism to Mythorealism
3. Mythorealism, the Absurd, and Existential Despair in Yan Lianke's Memoir and Fiction: Confronting the Fate of Sisyphus in Modern China's Historical Traumas
4. Magical Realism, Mythorealism and the Re-presentation of History in the Works of Yan Lianke
5. Mythorealism or Pararealism? Yan Lianke's Short Fiction as a Key to Enter the Author's Representational World
6. Censure and Censorship: Prohibition and Presence of Yan Lianke's Writings in China
Part II: Absurdity & Spirituality 7. The Absurd as Method: The Chinese Absurdist Hero, Enchanted Power, and the Alienated Poor in Yan Lianke's Military Literature
8. Yan Lianke and Italo Calvino on the Absurdity of Urban Life
9. "Inverse Theology" in Yan Lianke's
Four Books and Franz Kafka's
The Trial 10. Elements of Modernism and the Grotesque in Yan Lianke's Early Fiction
11. Representing the Intellectuals in Yan Lianke's Recent Writing: An Exile of the Soul
12. The Dream, the Disease, and the Disaster: On Yan Lianke's
Dream of Ding Village 13. Yan Lianke's Novel
Heart Sutra: The Kiss of the Rock and the Egg
14. The Redemption of the Peach Blossom Spring: An Examination of the Human Condition in Yan Lianke's
Zhongyuan Part III: History & Gender 15. Creating a Literary Space to Debate the Mao Era: The Fictionalization of the Great Leap Forward in Yan Lianke's
Four Books 16. Disability, Revolution, and Historiography: Grandma Maozhi in
Lenin's Kisses 17. Corrective Catachresis: Capitalist Mystification Derailed in
The Explosion Chronicles and "The Story of Fertile Town"
18. Reconstructing the Self through Herstory: On Yan Lianke's
Tamen (
Shes)
19. Female Labor, the Third Sex, and Excrescence in Yan Lianke's Nonfiction
20. A Geocritical Study of Yan Lianke's Balou Mountain Stories: The Utopian Cognitive Mapping in Post-1949 China
21. An Ecocritical Approach to Yan Lianke's Literary Works
22. Paratextual Encounters in Yan Lianke's Fictional Worlds: Reading between the Lines
Part IV: Translation & Reception 23. Ideological Patterns in the Critical Reception of Yan Lianke: A Comparative Approach
24. The Challenge of Translating Yan Lianke's Literary Creation
25. Yan Lianke in Basque: Notes on Translating Sensory Images
26. The Translation and Reception of Yan Lianke in France
27. The Treacherous "News That Stays News":
The Four Books in Czech Translation
28. Translating the Chinese Cultural Other: Yan Lianke's
Shouhuo in English Translation
29. The Translation and Reception of Yan Lianke in Japan
30. The Translation and Reception of Yan Lianke's Fiction in Vietnam
31. The Reception and Significance of Yan Lianke's Works in Taiwan
32. The Reception of Yan Lianke in Hong Kong
About the author
Riccardo Moratto is Full Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Chinese Translation and Interpreting at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation (GIIT), Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), and Honorary Guest Professor at Nanjing Agricultural University. Prof. Moratto is a Chartered Linguist and Fellow Member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL), Visiting Scholar at Shandong University, Honorary Research Fellow at the Center for Translation Studies of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, and Expert Member of the Translators Association of China (TAC). Prof. Moratto is also an international conference interpreter and a renowned literary translator. He has published extensively in the fields of translation and interpreting studies and Chinese literature in translation.
Howard Yuen Fung Choy, Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, received his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Colorado. Chief editor of the Brill series
Hong Kong Culture and Literature and
African and Asian Anthropocene: Studies in the Environmental Humanities, co-editor of
Liu Zaifu: Selected Critical Essays (2021), editor of
Discourses of Disease: Writing Illness, the Mind and Body in Modern China (2016), the author of
Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng's China, 1979-1997 (2008), and the assistant author of
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Confucianism (2005), he has also published articles and translations in major scholarly journals, including
positions,
American Journal of Chinese Studies, and
Asian Theatre Journal.
Summary
Yan Lianke is one of the most important, prolific, and controversial writers in contemporary China. This companion presents a collection of critical essays by leading scholars from around the world, organised into some of the key themes of his work: Mythorealism; Absurdity; and History, as well as the challenges to translating his work.
