Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (review)

In the field of Chinese literature, the last decade of the twentieth century saw a renewed interest in late Qing fiction. In addition to numerous studies done by such Chinese scholars as Ouyang Jian and Zhao Jianzhong, two English monographs have been dedicated to late Qing and early republican fiction. Following David Der-wei Wang's 1997 book, Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911, Patrick Hanan has also reevaluated this transitional period, which featured several important developments in Chinese fiction, from critical commentaries and creative rewritings of the Honglou meng to the introduction and translation of Western novels, leading to the birth of modern Chinese fiction. While Wang's study intended to show that the characteristics of modernity were already pronounced in fictional writings long before the May Fourth revolution, Hanan's Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries examines "literary relations," that is, the relationship of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese fiction to both indigenous and foreign literary traditions.

The eleven essays collected here, written independently at different times, focus mainly on three aspects of the development of fiction in the late Qing and early republican periods. Hanan discusses artistic experimentation in the nineteenth-century novel, the interventions by Westerners in the development of the Chinese novel during that century, and rhetorical and generic innovations in the writings of the early twentieth century. Challenging the conventional view that after the Honglou meng vernacular fiction stagnated or even declined, Hanan reveals the artistry in the finest nineteenth-century writings by demonstrating the various ways in which a narrator was utilized. His accounts of the missionary narratives, John Fryer's fiction contest, and early translated Western novels in both vernacular and literary Chinese highlight the ideological and artistic impact of Westerners, especially missionaries, on Liang Qichao's "Fiction Revolution," and raise an issue previously neglected (or repressed) by scholars. After examining these important parameters of the nineteenth-century novel, Hanan further investigates three modern writers in terms of their indebtedness to and transcendence of both Chinese and Western traditions. Hanan's studies of Wu Jianren, Chen Diexian, and Lu Xun inform his reader about the emergence of the restricted narration, a first autobiographical romance written in literary Chinese, and the influence of European and Japanese writers on Lu Xun. Indeed, this book offers its reader an approach that "embraces influence as well as intertextuality, imitation as well as originality" (p. 1).

In his first essay, as in his salient studies of the seventeenth-century narrator, Hanan maps out the typical narrative techniques employed by nineteenth-century writers, categorizing them into four different types: "the personalized storyteller," "the virtual author," "the minimal narrator," and "the involved author."¹ Hanan demonstrates the continuity of traditional rhetoric in "the personalized storyteller" and "the minimal narrator," in which the simulation of oral storytelling prevalent in seventeenth-century fiction, as well as the suppressed narrator of the eighteenth-century Rulin waishi (The scholars), is creatively reused. In addition, he reveals a tendency for the narrator and the author to merge, as well as a further dramatization of narration in those novels that adopted the rhetoric of "the virtual author" and "the involved author." This merger suggests a development toward the restricted first-person narration, which did not appear in Chinese fiction until the early twentieth century. According to Hanan, both "reversion" to the old technique and innovation helped significantly to prepare for the advent of modern Chinese fiction. Such a view disputes not only the conventional underestimation of the nineteenth-century novel but also the beliefs that consistent, restricted narration could not have developed from the Chinese literary tradition and that modern writers had to have borrowed it from the Western novel.

However, despite the references in Hanan's analysis to the rhetorical strategies of novels in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is less...