The Mystified Boat:
Postmodern Stories from China

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest Editor Herbert J. Batt.

The Mystified Boat features postmodern fiction from China assembled by guest editor Herbert J. Batt. Shifting points of view, characters who misunderstand each other in ways that have dire consequences, unreliable narrators who address readers in order to tell them what to think, events that are impossible in the reality we know and depend on—these are some of the startling elements characteristic of the fiction in this volume.

The authors are some of China’s most experimental and best-known postmodernists: Ma Yuan, Ma Jian, Ge Fei, Hong Ying, Su Tong, Lin Bai, Yan Li, Can Xue, Wang Anyi, and Yu Hua. Through radical experiments with fiction, they seek to question the meaning of “story” and the many conventions that drive our assumptions about narrators and narration. Their stories take us from mountain villages to small towns on the outskirts of Chinese urban culture to the heart of cities, where life rushes at terrific speed.

In the overview essay, “Into the Labyrinth: An Introduction to Postmodern Chinese Fiction,” Batt and scholar Yongchun Cai clarify the intentions of the postmodern Chinese fiction writers, explain how the movement developed, and describe its influence in Chinese society and literature today.

The volume also includes rare ink-and-gouache works by painter Mu Xin and book reviews by Leza Lowitz, Trevor Carolan, Dino Mahoney, Liana Holmberg, Lavonne Leong, and others.

About the guest editor: Herbert J. Batt received his doctorate in Elizabethan drama from the University of Toronto, has taught at universities in Shanghai and Beijing, and has translated numerous works from Chinese. He is the editor and translator of Tales of Tibet, a collection of postmodern fiction written by contemporary Chinese and Tibetans, and was guest editor, with Tsering Shakya, of Song of the Snow Lion.

232 pp., winter 2003 (15:2), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-2799-6
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