China's Avant-Garde Fiction: An Anthology

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. China’s Avant-Garde Fiction brings together a group of exceptional writers (including Raise the Red Lantern author Su Tong) to the attention of an English-speaking audience.
This book will be enjoyed by those interested in Chinese literature, culture, and society—particularly readers of contemporary fiction.

Contributors. Bei Cun, Can Xue, Gei Fei, Ma Yuan, Su Tong, Sun Ganlu, Yu Hua

Translators. Eva Shan Chou, Michael S. Duke, Howard Goldblatt, Ronald R. Janssen, Andrew F. Jones, Denis C. Mair, Victor H. Mair, Caroline Mason, Beatrice Spade, Kristina M. Torgeson, Jian Zhang, Zhu Hong

An anthology of translated short stories from Chinese writers of the 1980s. Authors considered “avant-garde” because work reflects the seriousness of revolutionary concerns, the disinterest in the progress of the Chinese nation and celebra

Translation Review

Filled with images, hallucinations, myths, mental puzzles, and the fantastic, the contemporary experimental fiction of the Chinese avant-garde represents a genre unlike any other. Jing Wang has collected fourteen examples of this new school of writing that gained prominence in the late 1980s. Contributors include Ge Fei, Yu Hua, Su Tong, Can Xue, Bei Cun, Sun Ganlu, and Ma Yuan. Enriched by the work of a dozen distinguished translators, the stories present an aesthetic experience that may have outraged many revolutionary-minded readers in China, but one that also serves as a dramatic manifesto of the making of a postrevolutionary literary sensibility obsessed with form and the pleasure of storytelling.

Jing Wang is Associate Professor of Asian and African Languages and Literature at Duke University. She is the author of The Story of Stone, also published by Duke University Press, and of High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China.