Karneval der Götter. Mythologie, Moderne und Nation in Chinas 20. Jahrhundert

What is it about?

This book deals with the narrative strategies employed by the generation of fiction authors who had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Their stories reflect on the experience of an enthusiastic, violent, insecure and terror-stricken adolescence in China's remote, barely literate rural communities. There, everyone's survival not only depended on the goodwill of rich landowners, as the revolutionary master narrative suggested, but even more so on weather and other unpredictable conditions. Hence, modernity's linear model of time-as-progress and its promise to improve everyone's lives based on rational planning collided with the austere realities on site, mirrored in the powerful old stories of local oral traditions,

Featured Image