Chinese Literature in the Global Canon: The Quest for Recognition

Abstract

This chapter sketches out the course of post-Mao China's quest for international literary recognition and how it has periodically clashed with the vision of China popularized by books successful in the West. It discusses one case study that seems to express many of the tensions at the heart of Chinese literature's search for a place in the modern world canon: the preoccupation in the post-Mao literary world with a Chinese writer securing a Nobel Prize in Literature, and responses to the first Sinophone winner of the prize (in 2000), Gao Xingjian. The chapter particularly focuses on mainland reactions to Gaos prize as it aims to highlight the contradiction between a broad Sinophone literary identity and a narrower anxiety among literary figures in post- Mao China about the links between a global Sinophone literature and China,. Keywords: Chinese literature; Gao Xingjian; Modern Chinese writing; post- Mao China; Sinophone writing