Negotiating the Politics of Chinese Fiction: The Case of Yan Lianke's 'Child'

This article proposes "literal reading," a theoretical concept from Zhang Longxi, with the intent of resisting the reductionist reading of political implications of contemporary Chinese literature in Anglophone discourse. It uses Chinese writer Yan Lianke's novel The Four Books as a c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Texas studies in literature and language 2021-12, Vol.63 (4), p.434-458
Main Author: Xie, Haiyan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anglophones
Asian literature
Can Xue (1953- )
Case studies
Children
Chinese fiction
Chinese literature
Criticism and interpretation
Developing countries
Fiction
Hypotheses
LDCs
Literary characters
Literary language
Negotiation
Novelists
Novels
Political aspects
Politics
Reading
Translations
World literature
Writers
Yan Lianke
Yan, Lianke (1958- )
Zhang Longxi
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Description
Summary:This article proposes "literal reading," a theoretical concept from Zhang Longxi, with the intent of resisting the reductionist reading of political implications of contemporary Chinese literature in Anglophone discourse. It uses Chinese writer Yan Lianke's novel The Four Books as a case study, investigating how Yan's portrayal of the main character, the Child, has been misread or overinterpreted in English-language scholarship as a representation of the nation's repressive past while his idiosyncratic writing style and use of literary form as content have been glossed over.
ISSN:0040-4691
1534-7303
DOI:10.7560/TSLL63405