The subject of postmodernism has not only given rise to one of the most interesting and challenging cultural debates in the West, but also provoked considerable critical controversy in China. Quite a few writers and critics have denied the existence of postmodern fiction in Chinese literature, asserting that there is no such soil for it, and arguments against postmodern fiction have permeated China's literary world today, full of sound and fury. People outside of China, especially in the United States, tend to doubt whether such fiction exists in this non-affluent society of the socialist world.;This dissertation examines contemporary Chinese new fiction in the light of Western postmodern fiction and theories. It maintains that a large portion of this writing, with its new literary self-consciousness and social awareness, reveals the emerging cultural transformation in Chinese society, a change in sensibility that presents a radical challenge to the dominant discourse of the past forty plus years, as this new fiction points to a certain postmodern zeitgeist in the Chinese literary world. It suggests that Chinese literary postmodernism, if it is to be accepted as a current signal of tendencies in contemporary Chinese fiction, does not refer to a historical period as in the West, but an approach to understanding China's reality. As is exemplified in contemporary Chinese postmodern fiction, it represents a particular view of life, death, love, and the world--a particular way of thinking and re-thinking literary, social, political, cultural, and historical issues, hence a mode of discourse to deconstruct and reconstruct reality.;This dissertation thereby concludes that it is the peculiar multilateral relationships and pluralistic interactions among political, economic, ideological, and cultural conditions that have contributed to the postmodern literary emergence in China with its own characteristic features, for which neither economic development nor cultural mimesis can offer any adequate explanation.
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