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Proust and Mainland Chinese Writers: La Recherche and Its Postmodern Hypertexts

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Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on three mainland Chinese writers’ literary reception and intertextual engagement with the first integral translation of La Recherche in their respective novellas and short stories. The three chosen writers of my corpus—WANG Xiaobo (1952–1997), YU Hua (1960–), and WEI Hui (1973–)—represent three successive generations and different literary schools of contemporary Chinese writing. Whilst sharing a number of common intertextual and appropriative strategies, their respective engagements with Proust are greatly influenced by, and at the same time interact with, the first integral translation. My analysis goes beyond the general treatment of these writers’ intertextual references to Proust as ‘empirical findings’, by investigating textual details, their particular contexts, and their cross-cultural implications, in a society which was exponentially evolving into postmodernity .

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  1. Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Shuangyi Li

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Li, S. (2017). Proust and Mainland Chinese Writers: La Recherche and Its Postmodern Hypertexts. In: Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4454-0_3

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