Ideology and Form in Yan Lianke's Fiction

Xie analyzes three novels by the international award-winning Chinese writer Yan Lianke and investigates how his signature "mythorealist" form produces textual meanings that subvert the totalizing reality prescribed by literary realism. The term mythorealism, which Yan coined to describe his own writing style, refers to a set of literary devices that incorporate both Chinese and Western literary elements while remaining primarily grounded in Chinese folk culture and literary tradition. In his use of mythorealism, carrying a burden of social critique that cannot allow itself to become "political," Yan transcends the temporality and provinciality of immediate social events and transforms his potential socio-political commentaries into more diversified concerns for humanity, existential issues, and spiritual crisis. Xie identifies three modes of mythorealist narrative exemplified in Yan's three novels: the minjian (folk) mode in Dream of Ding Village, the allusive mode in Ballad, Hymn, Ode, and the enigmatic mode in The Four Books. By positioning itself against an ambiguous articulation of social determinants of historical events that would perhaps be more straightforward in a purely realist text, each mode of mythorealism moves its narrative from the overt politicality of the subject matter to the existential riddle of negotiating an alternative reality. A groundbreaking study of one of contemporary China's most important authors that will be of great value to scholars and students of Chinese literature.

Haiyan Xie is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in the School of Foreign Languages, Central China Normal University, China.

Introduction: Contemporariness and Contemporary Chinese Literature Yan Lianke and Chinese Fiction in the 1980s and 1990s Minjian Writing and Contemporary Chinese Writers The Alternative Contemporariness of Yan Lianke Selection of Texts and Summary of Chapters Notes Bibliography 1 Mythorealism as Method The Unfilial Son of Realism The Paradox of Mythorealism Mythorealist Causality and Realities in the Western Perspective Ideology, Form, and the Representation of Reality in Mythorealism Notes Bibliography 2 AIDS and the Haunted Minjian: Negotiating the National Character in Dream of Ding Village Introduction The Fever as an Allegory of the National Character The Bystanders and the Ghost's Gaze Haunting Dreams and the Tainted Moral Defender Conclusion Notes Bibliography 3 Disenchanted Shijing and Spiritual Crisis: Allusive Sex and Illusive Disgust in Ballad, Hymn, Ode Introduction Ballad, Hymn, Ode, and Its Mytorealist Components The Desymbolized World and the Disenchanted Intellectuals The Indeterminacy of Sex and the Schizophrenic The Disgusting and the Dystopian Imagination of Spiritual Home Conclusion Notes Bibliography 4 Docile Body and Ethical Self: The Religious, the Grotesque, and the Mythological in The Four Books Introduction The Re-Ed District: An Absurdist Foucauldian Panopticon Rediscovering Haizi: A Religious Care for Self and Others Crazy Wheat and Cannibalism: Renegotiating Self through the Grotesque The Eastern Sisyphus: A Mythological Reconciliation between the Political and the Ethical Conclusion Notes Bibliography Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index