The Chinese Postmodern

The Chinese Postmodern is a pioneering study of contemporary Chinese avant-garde fiction from the perspective of cultural and literary postmodernity, historical trauma, and rhetorical irony. Showcasing the talents of such major writers as Can Xue, Ge Fei, Ma Yuan, Mo Yan, Xu Xiaohe, and Yu Hua, this volume focuses on the interplay between historical psychology and representational mode and between political discourse and literary rhetoric.

Xiaobin Yang draws on a number of theories, psychoanalysis and deconstruction in particular, and incorporates them into the sociohistorical approach to illuminate the nuances of literary and cultural phenomena. Revealing the hidden connection between the deconstructive mode of writing and the post-traumatic historical experience, The Chinese Postmodern shows how avant-garde literature brings about a heterogeneous literary paradigm that defies the dominant, subject-centered one in twentieth-century China.

Skillfully examining the problem of Chinese postmodernity against the background of culturo-political modernity in twentieth-century China, The Chinese Postmodern redefines Chinese modernity and postmodernity through textual analyses of canonical and avant-garde works.

In addition to being a pioneering study of contemporary Chinese avant-garde fiction, this challenging work is also an attempt to delineate the changes of literary paradigms in modern Chinese literature. By way of characterizing avant-garde fiction, it provides a macroscopic picture of twentieth-century Chinese literature that registers the sociohistorical trends of intellectual and cultural (post-)modernity. In this regard, it is also a theorization of the intellectual history of modern China.