Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels

摘要

Jeffrey C. Kinkley's new book, Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels, serves as a further extension of the Euramerican academic literature on an important, if to a certain degree contested, form of writing in the PRC, namely, new historical fiction (xinlishi xiaoshuo). While others working in English have produced monographs on this quasi-genre before, for instance Lin Qingxin (Brushing History against the Grain, Hong Kong University Press, 2005) and Howard Y. F. Choy (Remapping the Past, Brill, 2008), Kinkley's contribution stands out for its, one might say, grander historical, multiregional scale. By not limiting his attention solely to the literary emplotment of dystopian themes in Chinese new historical fiction from the 1980s up until the present, and by bringing into the discussion the shared links this quasi-genre has with narrative explorations of dystopia in the Slavic and Anglophone literary worlds, as well as links to Latin American magical and post-magical realism, Kinkley highlights, on the one hand, the transhistorical scope of dystopian anxieties, whilst simultaneously pointing out that "China's recent dystopian historical novels constitute a fresh and distinctive strain within it" (italics added) (ⅹⅱ). When one considers the growing visibility of contemporary Chinese literature on the world stage, and the influence of Anglo-European and later Latin American "Boom" fiction on many Chinese writers, Kinkley's consideration of these literatures together seems most timely.