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Bibliography

Guan Renshan’s full-length novel Golden Valley and Silver Mountain focuses on the depiction of rural life in an era of profound transformation. Notably, the novel refers to Builders of a New Life, Liu Qing’s representative work five times. This indicates that the conception and writing of Guan Renshan’s Golden Valley and Silver Mountain are significantly influenced and guided by Liu Qing’s Builders of a New Life. This influence is manifested not only in the fact that Fan Shaoshan, the protagonist in Golden Valley and Silver Mountain, regards Builders of a New Life as a sacred existence, and the counterpart relationship between Fan Shaoshan and Liang Shengbao, the protagonist in Builders of a New Life, but also directly in the setting of characters relationships in the two novels.

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Telling Chinese stories and Chinese experience is an important theme of realist literature in the new era. Chinese writers in the new era face the significant challenge of how to understand the “totality of China” and how to construct the totality spirit and aesthetic character of the “Chinese” narrative. Above Baiyangdian Lake by Guan Renshan takes the historical changes that occurred in the typical environment of Baiyangdian New Area as the content of narration, revealing the growth of people and history and its “Chinese” connotation through the story of the growth of “new character” in the new era. The novel depicts the “rediscovery” and rebirth of history and traditions of China in the new era by “telling stories,” and puts them under a profound context of the past and present and in a broad vision of China and foreign countries, thus constructing the overall aesthetics of realism in contemporary China with an epic grand narrative. The novel artistically shows the building and growth process of China in the new era, and demonstrates its leveraging of resources and unique connotation. It is a typical text for understanding the relationship between the image shaping of China in the new era and Chinese realism literature, as well as the connotation, function and form of Chinese realism.

Above Baiyangdian Lake is a novel set against the backdrop of the great changes in rural China in the new era, revolving around the grand theme of China’s contribution to the harmonious development of the world with Chinese wisdom and its solutions. The subject of Above Baiyangdian Lake is grand as it involves politics, culture, economy, and many other aspects. Its publication has reversed the narrowing tendency of Chinese novels in terms of themes and subjects. Above Baiyangdian Lake reconstructs historical time for Chinese modernization with its time consciousness based on a historical perspective. Wang Juexin and Qiao Mai shaped by the writer have contributed to the range of Chinese contemporary literary characters as typical images of the new characters of the era. The value of epic masterpieces like Above Baiyangdian Lake should be fully explored and advocated to provide a useful reference for the development of literature in the new era.

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As one of the representative Chinese writers who was born in the 1970s, Qiao Ye’s writing exhibits considerable diversity and varied understandings of literature across genres. In her full-length novels, Qiao Ye is exceptionally innovative and exploratory, and each novel is distinct in subject matter and style. However, her medium-length and short stories tend to be more conservative, characterized by a simple and natural style, imbued with the charm of literary tradition. This artistic stance in writing style is different from other writers and unique to Qiao Ye, which is not only indicative of her vivid artistic individuality but also holds value for further research into creative writing and stylistics.

Baoshui Village, a full-length novel by Qiao Ye, presents to its readers an open, sensitive, holistic, and reflective experiential texture thanks to the writer’s years of preparation spent “going into” and “immersing herself in villages,” as well as her rural narrative focusing on the complexity, contemporaneity, and problem of rural revitalization. The novel employs dual-narrative technique of recounting emotional and village history to advance its plot, paints pictures of village life with polyphonous scenes of village gossip, and engages in participatory observation through the use of the narrator to construct an open subject consciousness that discovers blind spots, surprises, disparities, and paradoxes in the rural experience. By selectively reconstructing the experiences of three archetypal villages and creating the new literary image of a “rural construction expert,” the novel conveys a realistic attitude that values the subjectivity and endogenous power of the countryside. In doing so, this method takes the structure of reality as its core and calls for a pragmatic standpoint that suspends any judgment, so as to “read” the Chinese countryside through the texture of reality.

Qiao Ye's literary creations are inextricably linked with Chinese literary tradition. In her novels, she transforms many traditional techniques found in traditional Chinese literature in a creative manner, and has gradually crafted her unique writing form of “new novel of society” in her two-decade writing career. Qiao Ye’s unique artistic exploration not only enables the stories in her works to reflect the social conditions, and human nature and human relationships in contemporary Chinese society, but also presents a new, more casual format that uses hybrid discourse and intersections of identity in its literary narrative, thus forming Qiao Ye’s personalized artistic style of analytic/reflective narrative. This should be regarded as Qiao Ye’s creative transformation to the traditional discourse found in Chinese story-telling novels or pan-story-telling novels.

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In her novel Baoshui Village, Qiao Ye narrates from a keen female perspective about the awakening and transformation of contemporary rural women, portraying the great changes in rural China in the new era. The “Baoshui Village” in the novel is not only a rural space as the object of writing, but also provides a significant background against which the great changes in rural China are depicted. It also serves as an important means to advance the plot of the novel and provides a way to organize the time of the novel. In the novel, Qiao Ye connects the village and the world outside the village from the dual perspectives of the heroine Di Qingping, to create a new relationship between people and countryside, and between rural areas and cities from a perspective of totality to paint a new picture of rural China.

Novel writings in China in 2023 display a tendency toward locality which exhibits two characteristics: One is the “sense of hometown,” and the other is the “integration of locality with modernity.” Qiao Ye’s novel Baoshui Village is a representative work that achieves “modernity” through “locality.” How contemporary novels portray the changing countryside, and how they handle and grasp the relationship and proportion between change and constancy; how to find the right way to integrate the geographical, ethnic, and modern aspects of a novel; how locality generates modernity; and how modernity can accommodate and activate locality are not only theoretical questions that need to be deeply explored but also issues of writing that need continuous exploration in practice. In this sense, Baoshui Village is worth cherishing.

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Book Description

Academic News

Abstract

The Maihe River, a novel by Guan Renshan, can be regarded as a summarizing work of transcendence of the writer’s neo-realism style, showcasing his pursuit and formulation of the “new rural epic” aesthetic, which has major significance for both the writer’s creative process and contemporary Chinese realism writing. In this novel, Guan Renshan not only epically portrays the changing relationship between farmers and their land by using poetic sentiment and rational philosophical thought, but also probes deeply into these new rural areas, new villages, and new farmers developed under the impact of modernity, demonstrating his keen insight and thought.

Above Baiyangdian Lake is a meticulously crafted novel by Guan Renshan nearing a million words in length. The novel offers a panoramic view of everyday life in Baiyangdian Lake and the development of the Xiong’an New Area. The novel exemplifies a genuine sense of the scene by presenting readers with a vivid, authentic depiction of our contemporary life. He employs a narrative structure that overlaps the present with the past, blending tradition and modernity to create a truly magnificent epic. Rather than avoiding the contradictions and darkness inherent to humanity, the novel embraces them and strives to accurately depict their complexity, resulting in a more profound reflection on society. Above Baiyangdian Lake expands and innovates the path of local literature by applying a genuinely realistic approach. It not only surpasses Guan’s writing style, but also represents a transcendence of local writing conventions in contemporary literature. It draws upon and elevates the literary tradition of the Hehuadian School, emerging as a notable example of new local writing with distinct regional traits.

The Maihe River by Guan Renshan returns to the literary principle of traditional realism and insists on the rural narrative based on daily experience. It is a novel that truly traces rural life, with a focus on the land circulation system and the fate of farmers. In the work, Guan Renshan integrates farmers’ love for the land into a culture of the land and a culture of wheat. Land worship and the trend of modern agricultural development in The Maihe River constitute a profound tension. In this novel, he investigates possibilities for rural modernization as well as reasonable and legitimate means to realize them.

Book Description

Bibliography

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Since its publication in 2016, Paper Hawk has been studied by literary critics from different angles, such as its inheritance of the Chinese classical literature tradition, its conception of language and structure form, and even its usage of imagery. The historical imagination in the novel has also attracted great attention in academic circles. As one of the clues in the novel, Chinese cuisine enables the writer to outline the setting of the era and human nature, and reflect on traditional culture with a keen insight. Taking food as a starting point, I explores the path of historical evolution, its development as well as its ups and downs. A warm thanks also goes out to Dr. Xu Shiying for her interview on historical writing (Appendix follows), which represents the historical depth of Paper Hawk in a dialogue format.

Scarlet Bird and Paper Hawk by Ge Liang have inherited the style of novel of society which began with The Plum in the Golden Vase, carefully depicting scenes of daily life and exuding the great charm of antiquity. This coincides with the trend in contemporary Chinese literature toward using local resources and seeking cultural identity after the 1990s. However, while the neo-classical texts of Ge Liang are quite realistic in appearance, their inner vitality and spirit cannot be easily replicated. In contrast, the “Jiangnan Trilogy” by Ge Fei is far less imitative of classical novels than the novels of Ge Liang, but the pursuit of utopia is used throughout the trilogy to connect the main storylines of the destinies of four generations of the Lu family and is closely related to China’s grand history over the past century. While drawing on ancient Chinese cultural resources, Ge Fei injects brand new and heterogeneous elements into his works, reviving traditional lyrical styles and creating a new “Chinese poetics.”

The short stories written by Ge Liang are simple yet sophisticated, always revealing a slice of life through plain narration. His short stories not only allow one to trace the “pioneering” influence of Su Tong but also carry Su Tong’s unique writing style and characteristics. It seems that Ge Liang is able to offer insight into the softest part of humanity, narrating fatalistic yet hardworking characters. His stories are written in a detailed and authentic style, exhibiting the literary memory of a young southern writer in a “more southern” region with a “southern imaginary” form linked to writers of Su Tong’s generation. This form includes cultural, geographical, and daily life features. Every life detail and the aesthetic style contained has become the basic tone and color of Ge Liang’s writing, forming a literary narrative with a distinct style.

Abstract

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