Outsiders and liminality in Chinese laogai, avant-garde, and urban-based fiction: from critical inquiry to creative practice

Abstract

Contemporary Chinese fiction is notable for its interest in outsider figures, who are often construed as alienated from contemporary or contemporaneous discourse and out of step with hegemonic constructions of history and identity. This thesis examines outsider representations in a sample of post-Mao Chinese fiction in English translation by authors Zhang Xianliang, Wang Shuo, Ze Zechen, Yu Hua, Gao Xingjian, and Chen Ran. Taking account of some pertinent sociocultural and literary contexts, the thesis surveys how liminal identities, states, and situations are depicted, including by means of carceral tropes, metaphors, dichotomies. Outsiders can be understood in these works as variously restrained and restricted by prison houses of language, estranged from history, or set apart or against the dominant currents within their urban environments. The examined authors nurture ambivalence in their fictions and they destabilise subject positions, foreground liminal territories of alienation and encounter, and adopt metafictional strategies to undermine the authority and/or integrity of their own narratives. This thesis is transcultural in outlook and form and constitutes a case study in bi-directional, or “rhizomatic”, critical-creative inquiry. An analysis of how outsiders are represented across Chinese laogai, avant-garde, and urban fiction genres has contributed to the generation of an original creative work: Kang, a novel. Kang (re) imagines the experiences of one Chinese protagonist, a laogai veteran, whose life history spans the main periods covered in the primary texts. The plotlines involving the other central characters, two foreign China-based outsiders, serve as vehicles for the exploration of transcultural boundaries, limits, and encounters. To a certain extent those strands embody or dramatize the writer-researcher’s own positionality as an outsider to China, writing (back) in.

Date of Award	29 Mar 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Winchester
Supervisor	Inga Bryden (Supervisor) & Vanessa Harbour (Supervisor)