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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.

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Book Description

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Bibliography

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Above Baiyangdian Lake is another full-length realistic novel written by Guan Renshan after The Maihe River. In this work, Guan Renshan goes beyond traditional rural writing and artistically narrates the grand landscape of Baiyangdian New Area and the changes of people’s fate during its construction. With Guan’s refined and mature narrative techniques, the novel clearly shows his ambition to present a “regional epic.” This paper delves into the fictional text and analyzes the structuring method of Above Baiyangdian Lake from multiple perspectives such as its character shaping with historical correspondence, and narrative structure, skills, and style, aiming to provide an approach to interpret the ideological schema of Above Baiyangdian Lake.

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.

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.

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Abstract

Time and culture are rivers without banks. The elegance and archaic style of culture is a kind of blood inheritance, and the myriad types of cooked food in the world are also a kind of passing of the torch from generation to generation. Against the vast backdrop of the century-old history of Lingnan (an area south of the Five Ridges in China), Ge Liang’s latest full-length novel, Food Is Heaven, is a wonderful story about the inheritance of four generations of chefs. It describes the cultivation of the industry as well as self-cultivation and conducting oneself in the world. “To see a world in a line of work, and one bodhi in a karma.” This novel reproduces the changes of the times and reveals the profound history and deep patriotism behind the Chinese food culture. It reflects on the inheritance of cooking skills and depicts the extraordinary roots of fine Chinese culture, and studies how the cohesive force of the Chinese nation in different regions has been unconsciously established through those roots.

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.

Ge Liang’s full-length novel Food Is Heaven depicts the legendary lives of figures such as Master Rong Yisheng, Uncle Wuju, the Seventh Young Master Xiang Xikun, and many others, in over 400,000 words. Generally speaking, Food Is Heaven is a fictional work using imaginary characters as its protagonists. However, its hidden interplay with important historical events from the 20th century onwards is an undeniable fact. These non-fictional elements employed by Ge Liang are part of his artistic strategy of achieving literary authenticity in Food Is Heaven. The incorporation of major historical figures and events into artistic fiction highlights a certain “epic” quality in the narrative which emerges out of its full engagement with historical essence and historical facts.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.”

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Abstract

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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.