Other Worlds: A Genealogy from Lu Yao’s Capitalist Realism to Maoni’s Internet Literature

Abstract

This article elaborates on a genealogy linking the internet literature writer Maoni’s work to the Reform-era writer Lu Yao’s realist epic Ordinary World ( Pingfan de shijie). Most of the works on the popular Qidian platform on which Maoni publishes are shaped by fan-culture-derived (“fannish”) technologies aimed at maximizing reader engagement, which results in a textual community that blurs the lines between writer and reader. The aesthetic that emerges from this community, as illustrated by Maoni’s novel Joy of Life ( Qing yu nian), is one that emphasizes characters over narrative, stresses the delineation of an expansive fictional universe (“world-building”), and frequently cites tropes and intertexts familiar to the novel’s readers. Maoni’s textual community borrows not only from Western fantasy, Japanese ACGN (Anime, Comics, Games, Novels) culture, and pre-modern Chinese literature but also from Lu Yao and the socialist literature that shaped Lu Yao — an influence on Maoni’s internet fiction that remains understudied. Following Maoni’s lead, this article revisits Ordinary World and the institutions that produced it to identify the elements that could be reinscribed as fannish. This genealogy illustrates how configurations of writer, reader, and text with roots in the socialist and early Reform eras are reappropriated by internet literature for radically different ends. It suggests that scholars of internet literature, rather than placing undue stress on a technology-powered rupture with the past, should consider the points of congruence between socialist and postsocialist media ecologies.