This book offers a welcome addition to the limited English-language scholarship on two of China's most important contemporary authors, Su Tong 蘇童 (1963-) and Yu Hua 余華 (1960-). As Li seeks to show how these writers' parodistic works enrich the Bildungsroman tradition, her survey also documents literary works that deepen the social history of China's tragic Cultural Revolution.
To frame her study, Li draws on Western theories of the Bildungsroman, a term coined in 1819 to refer to Goethe's seminal Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795). A concept popularized by philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the genre has been celebrated for its portrayals of the Bildung (formation) of the protagonist, as well as for its moral education of the reader. Later applied to precursor works by Sterne, Voltaire, and Rousseau, the Bildungsroman and related categories have forcefully shaped readers' expectations of genre classics by Stendhal, the Brontës, Dickens, and Thomas Mann, and these...
