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by Xiaobin Yang. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002. ix + 286 pp. £42.50 (Hardcover). ISBN 0-472-11241-4
This study contains, among other stimulating and thoughtful passages, a comparison of the literary fiction of the period 1985 to the end of the twentieth century with its immediate predecessor theyangbanxi (Cultural Revolution theatrical works of the late 1960s and early 1970s), as well as reference to the post-Cultural Revolution economic and political changes of Deng Xiaoping's regime. Like Chen Xiaomei's Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China , it is a welcome subversion of attempts by some critics to draw a rigid line between the products of the Cultural Revolution and the following period.
The author focusses his attention on a selection of major figures in the new movement: Can Xue, Yu Hua, Ma Yuan, Ge Fei, Mo Yan and Xu Xiaohe. Apart from Xu Xiaohe, a former Jintian [Today] writer, all of these writers have been extensively studied by Western and Chinese scholars in the past decade, although only a limited number of these studies are referred to in the main text or listed in the bibliography....