Traveling through Time and Searching for Utopia: Utopian Imaginaries in Internet Time-Travel Fiction

Abstract

The time-travel genre of Chinese Internet literature combines old mythological motifs with contemporary science fiction approaches to create a narrative line in which the protagonist travels through time, undergoes a series of trials, discovers new worlds, and realizes an idealized life. Borrowing Foucault’s theory of utopian bodies and heterotopias and taking Tianxia Guiyuan’s female-oriented Internet novel Empress Fuyao as its exemplary case, this study analyzes how time-travel fiction uses time travel in order to image a “utopia” and what kind of “new world” is projected by this utopia. In the process, this paper will simultaneously examine the relationship between utopia and twenty-first century China’s new media literature.

Keywords

Internet literature / time-travel fiction / utopian body / heterotopia / Tianxia Guiyuan / Empress Fuyao

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

Higher Education Press and Brill