Lexington Books
Pages: 176
Trim: 6¼ x 9
978-1-7936-0901-4 • Hardback • November 2021 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-7936-0902-1 • eBook • November 2021 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Will Gatherer is lecturer in Chinese at the University of Queensland.
1) Introduction
2) Chapter 1: Early Works
3) Chapter 2: High (Altitude) Metafiction: Self-reflexivity and Polyvocality in Tibet
4) Chapter 3: Later Works
5) Chapter 4: Monsters and Demons 牛鬼蛇神
6) Chapter 5: Entanglement 纠缠 & The Huang Tang Family 黄堂一家
7) Chapter 6: Guniangzhai 姑娘寨
8) Chapter 7: Conclusions
9) References
10) About the Author
In this comprehensive and authoritative study, Will Gatherer presents new and thought-provoking perspectives on the work of Ma Yuan. Famous for his narrative experiments, Ma Yuan is conventionally seen as representative of a short-lived 'avant-garde' movement in Chinese fiction of the late 1980s. By subjecting all of Ma's work to analytical scrutiny, including his more recent writings since his return to the literary scene in the 2010s, Gatherer makes an elegant case for disassociating Ma from larger cultural "movements" and focusing on his individual aesthetic project. In doing so, Gatherer's scholarship also signals a long overdue return to the genre of 'author studies,' of which there are still far too few in the field of modern Chinese literature.
— Michel Hockx, University of Notre Dame
This illuminating study of Ma Yuan, a key figure in China’s avant-garde fiction of the 1980s who later returned to the literary stage after a 20-year hiatus, offers the most probing and extensive study of the writer’s work to date. Gatherer’s focused readings of Ma Yuan’s intricately absurdist and provocative work across the span of his career open up stimulating new understandings of how Chinese culture has evolved from postmodernism in the Dengist era to the post-postmodern condition under Xi Jinping. This elegantly-written book is key reading for anyone interested in China’s literary scene over the last 40 years.
— Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford