National University of Singapore
THE AESTHETICS OF MYTHOREALISM AND THE RURAL WORLD IN COMTEMPORARY CHINESE WORLD LITERATURE
Abstract
dc:description.abstractMy thesis investigates literary representations of the rural figure in Chinese environmental world literature, who, as an embodiment of backwardness, enters a post-socialist present, but only on its margins. It does so through a sustained analysis of Ma Jian’s The Dark Road and Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips, which expose the social and ecological costs of China’s precipitous development. By approaching the novels through their historical attention to the class-based environmental injustice in China, I underscore the rural figure as testimony—at once material and allegorical—to China’s delayed entry into, and current dominance within, multinational capital. The Chinese eco-fictions are defined stylistically by what author Yan Lianke terms ‘mythorealism’, which fuses the mythic, the magical, and the archaic with the real and contemporary. The aesthetic category of mythorealism in the novels registers the degradation of the rural figure and the nativist cultural imaginary in post-socialist China.
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
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