Reading Wang Wenxing: Critical Essays

This is the first book-length study of Wang Wenxing in English offering biographic, cultural, textual, literary, and linguistic readings of his work. The essays cover topics such as Wang’s writing principles, typology of characters, analysis of lexicon, employment of stream-of-consciousness, musicality, relationship to Modernist writers of the West, relationship to Lu Xun, and issues of translating Wang’s works into Western languages. Also presented are original contributions by Wang Wenxing illuminating his own writing through a discussion of his way of reading and a biographical essay by Ch’en Chu-yun, his wife, who shares with the reader moments in their private life and the writing habits of her husband. In addition, this work includes outlines of Wang’s novels and bibliographies that are valuable to both students and scholars in their studies of Wang Wenxing’s writing in particular as well as to the understanding of Taiwanese and Chinese literatures in general. | 392 pages

CONTENTS

Author’s Preface: “Reading and Writing” vii

Editors’ Preface xxvii

Acknowledgments xxix

Introduction xxxi

I ESSAYS

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE

1 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang Wang Wenxing and Lu Xun: High-Culture Quest, Enlightenment Rationality, and the Modernist Duality 3

2 Ihor Pidhainy Archetypes in Wang Wenxing’s Early Fiction: Insecure Intellectuals and Dangerous Women 30

3 Darryl Sterk Screwed by Fate? The Prostitute and the Critique of Liberalism in Backed Against the Sea 53

4 Jane Parish Yang Leaving Home: Foreshadowing, Echo, and Sideshadowing in Wang Wenxing’s Jia bian 78

QUESTIONS OF STYLE

5 Wai-lim Yip Wang Wenxing: Novelist as Lyric Sculptor 91

6 Shu-ning Sciban Family Catastrophe and Its Connection with Traditional Chinese Literature 110

7 Wei Cai The Use of Liheci in Family Catastrophe 129

8 Hengsyung Jeng Harmony, Counterpoint, and Variation in Backed Against the Sea 146

9 Te-hsing Shan The Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in Wang Wenxing’s Fiction 186

REFLECTIONS ON TRANSLATIONS

10 Sandrine Marchand The Poetics of Rhythm in Wang Wenxing’s Novels 213

11 Fred Edwards Translating and Editing Wang Wenxing 230

12 Susan Dolling Reflections on Translating Jia bian 249

REFLECTIONS ON WANG WENXING'S LIFE

13 Jeannette Chu-yun Chen A Quiet and Simple Life 259

14 Te-hsing Shan Wang Wenxing on Wang Wenxing 269

II APPENDICES

A OUTLINES OF THE NOVELS

15 Shu-ning Sciban Tentative Outline of Family Catastrophe 285

16 Te-hsing Shan Tentative Outline of Backed Against the Sea Vol. 1 298

17 San-hui Hung Tentative Outline of Backed Against the Sea Vol. 2 302

B BIBLIOGRAPHIES

18 Bibliography I Interviews with and Biographical References to Wang Wenxing 309

19 Bibliography II Critiques of Wang Wenxing’s Works 316

20 Bibliography III Translations of Wang Wenxing’s Works 335

About the Contributors 339

Editors

• Shu-ning SCIBAN is Associate Professor of Chinese language and literature in the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and East Asian Studies at the University of Calgary.
• Ihor PIDHAINY is Assistant Professor of History at Marietta College.