Negotiating the Politics of Chinese Fiction: The Case of Yan Lianke's "Child"

ABSTRACT:This article proposes "literal reading," a theoretical concept from Zhang Longxi, with the intent of resisting the reductionist reading of political implications of contemporary Chinese literature in Anglophone discourse. It uses Chinese writer Yan Lianke's novel The Four Books as a case study, investigating how Yan's portrayal of the main character, the Child, has been misread or overinterpreted in English-language scholarship as a representation of the nation's repressive past while his idiosyncratic writing style and use of literary form as content have been glossed over.