This dissertation focuses on contemporary Chinese historical fiction, which became one of the most prominent literary phenomena in the 1980s and 1990s, but which has not yet been systematically surveyed in English language scholarship. This study investigates how writers of Deng Xiaoping's reform era undermined the grand narrative of official history by imagining and rewriting the past. It showcases fictions of history by eleven native Chinese, Muslim and Tibetan authors: Han Shaogong, Mo Yan, Wang Anyi, Zhang Chengzhi, Tashi Dawa, Alai, Ge Fei, Su Tong, Wang Shuo, Liu Heng, and Yu Hua. The four chapters are organized in terms of different spatial schemes of fictional historiography, namely, regional histories and family romances, discourses on diaspora and myths of minorities, nostalgia for the hometown in the country and the city, as well as the bodily text and the textual body. Beginning with a review of "revolutionary historical fiction" and "scar literature," this research broadly covers the literary movements and styles of "root search," new historicism, magical realism, descriptive historiography, visual storytelling, and space plotting, in addition to the themes about language, heroism, decadence, memory, food, sex, and violence in regard to historical writing. It also contains an appendix on an etymological reexamination of the Chinese character for "history" or "historian."; The thesis is interdisciplinary and intertextual in its approach---fictional works, historical texts and firsthand materials are read side by side in the light of both Chinese criticisms and Western theories. This enables the reader to see when a storyteller keeps silent, what historical event is implicitly referred to, and why it is untold; and when the historian stops, how the storyteller begins to rebut and retell history in alternative ways. Blurring the boundary between facts and fantasy, the historical novels and stories analyzed here remap the past of China by discovering truths through fictions. Meanwhile, the genre itself is reinvented with the use of both traditional Chinese literary modes and modern Western writing techniques. In closing, the notion of a "retro-fiction" is brought forth to summarize the post-Mao literary trend against the teleology of material progression in capitalistic communist China.
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