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Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction: Quest for Historicity and Transcendent Truth Zhansui Yu Amherst, New York : Cambria Press , 2017 viii + 240 pp. $114.99 ISBN 978-1-60497968-8
Book Reviews
The experimental literary production of the People's Republic of China during the 1980s, which was freed from many of the aesthetic strictures of the Mao era, deserves more scholarly attention. Zhansui Yu's monograph aims to help fill this gap by focusing on the avant-garde fiction of Su Tong, Yu Hua and Ge Fei. For Yu, this fiction achieved two broad aims. First, it critiqued the revolutionary teleology inculcated through decades of PRC propaganda by subverting their epic clichés and narrative morphologies, thus laying bare the ways in which previous propaganda promoted a false history. Second, it featured the first sustained expression of "transcendence" in both premodern and modern Chinese literature; here Yu extols an existentialist vision of the human condition balanced on the fragile precipice of non-being.
This is one of few monographs on Chinese literature that features a sustained engagement with the thought of Martin Heidegger. Given the penchant...