Paratextual Encounters in Yan Lianke's Fictional Worlds

Abstract

This chapter considers the ways in which ideas of Yan Lianke's authorship are portrayed in the authorial paratext to a selection of his contemporary novels. It posits that Yan's authorial paratext exhibits a unique forum for exploring the interplay between Yan as the author, his readers, and the text. Within the context of literary censorship in China, and the contested reception of Yan's novels outside the mainland, this chapter illustrates Yan's unique literary response to the mechanisms of censorship in China, suggesting that his writing has developed in such a way over a prolonged period of literary creation in which he has, in his previous works, been subject to and complicit in the act of self-censoring his own writing. Drawing from existing debates on the use and implications of the paratextual constructs of the contemporary Chinese novel, this chapter argues that the creative framework of Yan's fiction is fundamentally significant in ascribing within contemporary Chinese literature a means by which Chinese writers might be able to successfully negotiate, through fiction, the ideological guidelines and mechanisms of literary censorship existent within China.