- Source: The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren
The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren: The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China is a 2015 non-fiction book by Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng (Chinese: 吳國坤), published by Brill Publishers.
The author discusses how historical developments in Chengdu affected Li Jieren's stories.
According to the author, Li Jieren had nativist views favoring Sichuan province.
Background
Ng wrote a PhD thesis at Harvard University, which was presented in 2004. This thesis was reworked into this book.
Contents
The book has six chapters and a conclusion.
The analysis framework and discussions of life circumstances of the author are in the first chapter.
The second chapter discusses how the Chengdu area is used in the novel Ripple on Stagnant Water.
The Great Wave is discussed in Chapter 3.
Before the Tempest is discussed in Chapter 4.
The Great Wave is discussed again in Chapter 5, this time about a relationship between an aunt character and a nephew character.
Chapter 6 discusses how the author rewrote content after the Chinese Communist Party assumed power.
Sebastian Veg of EHESS stated that the titles of chapters "are also sometimes overly playful and hence ambiguous."
Reception
Yuehtsen Juliette Chung (Chinese: 鐘月岑; pinyin: Zhōng Yuècén) of National Tsing-Hua University stated that the book "makes a significant contribution" in its field.
Veg stated that the book demonstrates "the most engaging kind of doctoral research". Veg concluded that the work "will be of great interest to" people interested in Li Jieren's works and people interested in the history of the Republic of China period and the literary work of that period. Veg gave praise to the book's illustrations, with particular favor to those of Tongsu Huabao.
References
Veg, Sebastian (2017). "Kristin Stapleton, Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin's Family (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2016) ; Kenny Kwok-Kwan Ng, The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren: The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China (Leiden, Brill, 2015)". The China Quarterly (230): 550–553. doi:10.1017/S0305741017000820 – via Hypoteses, OpenEdition. - Copy at Cambridge Core
= Notes
=Further reading
"The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren: The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China". ProtoView. 2 (28). 2015.
Yue, Huanyu. "革命內外，書寫成都 —— 評 Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng, The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren: The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China" (PDF) (in Chinese). - Book review
Monumental Fictions: Geopoetics, Li Jieren, and Historical Imagination in Twentieth-Century China (Thesis). Harvard University. 2004.