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Xie analyses three novels by the international award-winning Chinese writer Yan Lianke and investigates how his signature "mythorealist" form produces textual meanings that subvert the totalizing reality prescribed by literary realism. A groundbreaking study of one of contemporary China's most important authors.
List of contents
Introduction: Contemporariness and Contemporary Chinese Literature
Yan Lianke and Chinese Fiction in the 1980s and 1990s
Minjian Writing and Contemporary Chinese Writers
The Alternative Contemporariness of Yan Lianke
Selection of Texts and Summary of Chapters
Notes
Bibliography
1 Mythorealism as Method
The Unfilial Son of Realism
The Paradox of Mythorealism
Mythorealist Causality and Realities in the Western Perspective
Ideology, Form, and the Representation of Reality in Mythorealism
Notes
Bibliography
2 AIDS and the Haunted Minjian: Negotiating the National Character in Dream of Ding Village
Introduction
The Fever as an Allegory of the National Character
The Bystanders and the Ghost’s Gaze
Haunting Dreams and the Tainted Moral Defender
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
3 Disenchanted Shijing and Spiritual Crisis: Allusive Sex and Illusive Disgust in Ballad, Hymn, Ode
Introduction
Ballad, Hymn, Ode, and Its Mytorealist Components
The Desymbolized World and the Disenchanted Intellectuals
The Indeterminacy of Sex and the Schizophrenic
The Disgusting and the Dystopian Imagination of Spiritual Home
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
4 Docile Body and Ethical Self: The Religious, the Grotesque, and the Mythological in The Four Books
Introduction
The Re-Ed District: An Absurdist Foucauldian Panopticon
Rediscovering Haizi: A Religious Care for Self and Others
Crazy Wheat and Cannibalism: Renegotiating Self through the Grotesque
The Eastern Sisyphus: A Mythological Reconciliation between the Political and the Ethical
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Haiyan Xie is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in the School of Foreign Languages, Central China Normal University, China.
Summary
Xie analyses three novels by the international award-winning Chinese writer Yan Lianke and investigates how his signature “mythorealist” form produces textual meanings that subvert the totalizing reality prescribed by literary realism. A groundbreaking study of one of contemporary China’s most important authors.
