The Routledge Companion to Yan Lianke

by Riccardo Moratto (Editor), Howard Yuen Fung Choy (Editor)

Overview

Yan Lianke is one of the most important, prolific, and controversial writers in contemporary China. This companion presents a collection of critical essays by leading scholars from around the world, organised into some of the key themes of his work: Mythorealism; Absurdity; and History, as well as the challenges to translating his work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367700973
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/29/2024
Series:	Routledge Literature Companions
Pages:	572
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Riccardo Moratto is Full Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Chinese Translation and Interpreting at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation (GIIT), Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), and Honorary Guest Professor at Nanjing Agricultural University. Prof. Moratto is a Chartered Linguist and Fellow Member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL), Visiting Scholar at Shandong University, Honorary Research Fellow at the Center for Translation Studies of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, and Expert Member of the Translators Association of China (TAC). Prof. Moratto is also an international conference interpreter and a renowned literary translator. He has published extensively in the fields of translation and interpreting studies and Chinese literature in translation.

Howard Yuen Fung Choy, Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, received his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Colorado. Chief editor of the Brill series Hong Kong Culture and Literature and African and Asian Anthropocene: Studies in the Environmental Humanities, co-editor of Liu Zaifu: Selected Critical Essays (2021), editor of Discourses of Disease: Writing Illness, the Mind and Body in Modern China (2016), the author of Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng's China, 1979-1997 (2008), and the assistant author of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Confucianism (2005), he has also published articles and translations in major scholarly journals, including positions, American Journal of Chinese Studies, and Asian Theatre Journal.

Table of Contents

Part I: Mythorealism & Censorship 1. Yan Lianke’s Mythorealist Representation of the Country and the City 2. Building Chinese Reality with Language and Metaphor: From Socialist Realism to Mythorealism 3. Mythorealism, the Absurd, and Existential Despair in Yan Lianke’s Memoir and Fiction: Confronting the Fate of Sisyphus in Modern China’s Historical Traumas 4. Magical Realism, Mythorealism and the Re-presentation of History in the Works of Yan Lianke 5. Mythorealism or Pararealism? Yan Lianke’s Short Fiction as a Key to Enter the Author’s Representational World 6. Censure and Censorship: Prohibition and Presence of Yan Lianke’s Writings in China Part II: Absurdity & Spirituality 7. The Absurd as Method: The Chinese Absurdist Hero, Enchanted Power, and the Alienated Poor in Yan Lianke’s Military Literature 8. Yan Lianke and Italo Calvino on the Absurdity of Urban Life 9. "Inverse Theology" in Yan Lianke’s Four Books and Franz Kafka’s The Trial 10. Elements of Modernism and the Grotesque in Yan Lianke’s Early Fiction 11. Representing the Intellectuals in Yan Lianke’s Recent Writing: An Exile of the Soul 12. The Dream, the Disease, and the Disaster: On Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village 13. Yan Lianke’s Novel Heart Sutra: The Kiss of the Rock and the Egg 14. The Redemption of the Peach Blossom Spring: An Examination of the Human Condition in Yan Lianke’s Zhongyuan Part III: History & Gender 15. Creating a Literary Space to Debate the Mao Era: The Fictionalization of the Great Leap Forward in Yan Lianke’s Four Books 16. Disability, Revolution, and Historiography: Grandma Maozhi in Lenin’s Kisses 17. Corrective Catachresis: Capitalist Mystification Derailed in The Explosion Chronicles and "The Story of Fertile Town" 18. Reconstructing the Self through Herstory: On Yan Lianke’s Tamen (Shes) 19. Female Labor, the Third Sex, and Excrescence in Yan Lianke’s Nonfiction 20. A Geocritical Study of Yan Lianke’s Balou Mountain Stories: The Utopian Cognitive Mapping in Post-1949 China 21. An Ecocritical Approach to Yan Lianke’s Literary Works 22. Paratextual Encounters in Yan Lianke’s Fictional Worlds: Reading between the Lines Part IV: Translation & Reception 23. Ideological Patterns in the Critical Reception of Yan Lianke: A Comparative Approach 24. The Challenge of Translating Yan Lianke’s Literary Creation 25. Yan Lianke in Basque: Notes on Translating Sensory Images 26. The Translation and Reception of Yan Lianke in France 27. The Treacherous "News That Stays News": The Four Books in Czech Translation 28. Translating the Chinese Cultural Other: Yan Lianke’s Shouhuo in English Translation 29. The Translation and Reception of Yan Lianke in Japan 30. The Translation and Reception of Yan Lianke’s Fiction in Vietnam 31. The Reception and Significance of Yan Lianke’s Works in Taiwan 32. The Reception of Yan Lianke in Hong Kong

Editorial Reviews

Yan Lianke is among the most controversial and sophisticated writers in contemporary China. He has a keen, journalistic sensibility with regard to social events and is capable of turning anything he touches into a dark carnival. This companion introduces Yan’s extraordinary background, kaleidoscopic style, Kafkaesque sense of humor, and his deepest concern about the fate of China. This is a most comprehensive reader, demonstrating not only Yan’s art and politics of fiction but also the construction and deconstruction of the ‘China story’ in our time.”

—David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, and Academician, Academia Sinica.

“As the first English volume on this prominent, avant-garde, and controversial writer, the Routledge Companion to Yan Lianke is a magnificent pioneering work covering a rich array of literary criticism. With a kaleidoscopical treatment of Yan Lianke’s novels, literary theory and essays, this book is a major achievement in addressing many pivotal themes such as mythorealism, absurdity, spirituality, history, gender, translation and reception.”

—Jianmei Liu, Professor of Chinese Literature, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

“Encyclopedic in scope and comprehensive in coverage, the Routledge Companion to Yan Lianke presents a deep critical dive into the oeuvre of one of the most important Chinese writers of the past thirty years. For readers who want a more nuanced understanding of Yan Lianke’s brilliant and twisted literary universe, this is the best place to start.”

—Michael Berry, Director, UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies Asian Languages & Cultures/Film, Television and Digital Media UCLA.

“This volume brings together wide-ranging, comprehensive and compelling studies of the major contemporary Chinese fiction writer Yan Lianke, whose innovative writing frequently goes against the grain and persistently transgresses narratological frontiers. The editors are to be congratulated on putting together this tour-de-force. It will stand for many years to come as essential reading for anyone interested in Yan Lianke and the mythorealist mode he promotes.”

—Gregory B. Lee FHKAH, Founding Professor of Chinese Studies, Head of Department of Chinese Studies, Department of Chinese Studies, School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews.

From the Publisher