Free Prose

Presentation

Heir to a long literary tradition, free prose, or sanwen, has become in modern times one of the four major genres of Chinese literature alongside poetry, ro-man and drama. Practised from time immemorial by a multitude of writers, it constitutes a very vast and complex field, and remains a genre little translated and little studied abroad. This book is intended as an introduction to some of the issues of modern sanwen.

Through a series of case studies that range chronologically from Lu Xun to Yan Lianke and Mu Xin, via Deng Tuo, Ba Jin or Wang Xiaobo, it deals with different types of literary prose and addresses different theoretical issues: terminological and definitional difficulties, the effects produced by the text according to its mode of publication, the role of the essay as a political weapon and as a testimony, and the frontier between fictional and non-fictional literature.

Editors

Angel Pino, sinologist, university professor, teaches in the Department of Chinese Studies at Bordeaux Montaigne University. He is in charge of the Centre d'études et de recherches sur l'Extrême-Orient (Plurielles, UR 24142) at the same university. A specialist in Ba Jin, he has devoted numerous studies to the writer and has translated several of his works.

Isabelle Rabut, professor at Inalco, is a specialist in modern and contemporary Chinese literature and Taiwanese literature. She has also translated the works of many writers, including Shen Congwen and Yu Hua.

280 pages
16 x 24 cm
Publication: 12/04/2023
ISBN: 9782858314188