China's avant-garde fiction
Subtitle: an anthology
By: edited by Jing Wang.
Contributors: Wang, Jing, 1950-
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Durham
Language: eng
Number of pages: 283
Subjects: Chinese fiction -- 20th century -- Translations into English; Experimental fiction
Description: Filled with mirages, hallucinations, myths, mental puzzles, and the fantastic, the contemporary experimental fiction of the Chinese avant-garde represents a genre of storytelling unlike any other. Whether engaging the worn spectacle of history, expressing seemingly unmotivated violence, or reinventing outlandish Tibetan myths, these stories are defined by their devotion to theatrics and their willful apathy toward everything held sacred by the generation that witnessed the Cultural Revolution.

Jing Wang has selected provocative examples of this new school of writing, which gained prominence in the late 1980s. Contradicting many long-cherished beliefs about Chinese writers - including the alleged tradition of writing as a political act against authoritarianism - these stories make a dramatic break from conventions of modern Chinese literature by demonstrating an irreverence toward history and culture and by celebrating the artificiality of storytelling.

Enriched by the work of a distinguished group of translators, this collection presents an aesthetic experience that may have outraged many revolutionary-minded readers in China, but one that also occupies an important place in the canon of Chinese literature.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.