Remolding and Resistance among Writers of the Chinese Prison Camp: Disciplined and Published

摘要

This edited volume provides a series of studies on what the editors have previously termed Chinese "Prison Camp Literature," in their ground-breaking study on the subject, The Great Wall of Confinement: The Chinese Prison Camp through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage (Berkeley, 2004). The present volume contains studies by various scholars of individual authors surveyed in the previous volume, and falling into various categories with regard to fictionality. Chapter two by C. T. Hsia, chapter three by Yenna Wu, and chapter four by Jeffrey Kinkley are all devoted to Zhang Xianliang's fictional and non-fictional accounts of life in and around a prison camp, which appeared prominently in the previous publication. In chapter five, Richard Madsen compares Wei Jingsheng's and Vaclav Havel's prison letters, while in chapter six Yenna Wu undertakes a close reading of Wumingshi's semi-fictionalized account of a former Guomindang officer's (designated by his pseudonym Hong Xianheng) incarceration in a Qinghai laogai camp from 1951 to 1978, published under the title Red Sharks (Hongsha).