This book offers a welcome addition to the limited English-language scholarship on two of China's most important contemporary authors, Su Tong 蘇童 (1963-) and Yu Hua 余華 (1960-). As Li seeks to show how these writers' parodistic works enrich the Bildungsroman tradition, her survey also documents literary works that deepen the social history of China's tragic Cultural Revolution.
To frame her study, Li draws on Western theories of the Bildungsroman, a term coined in 1819 to refer to Goethe's seminal Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795). A concept popularized by philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the genre has been celebrated for its portrayals of the Bildung (formation) of the protagonist, as well as for its moral education of the reader. Later applied to precursor works by Sterne, Voltaire, and Rousseau, the Bildungsroman and related categories have forcefully shaped readers' expectations of genre classics by Stendhal, the Brontës, Dickens, and Thomas Mann, and these expectations continue to influence the production and reception of world literature.
Franco Moretti linked the Bildungsroman's emergence to new modern opportunities for self-transformation occasioned by the industrial revolution. Li's first chapter reviews this and other theories, including Mikhail Bakhtin's emphasis on the protagonist's dynamic evolution. Li then defines her use of the Bildungsroman's Chinese counterpart, chengzhang xiaoshuo 成長小說, a term used since the 1990s. For Li, chengzhang xiaoshuo depict young protagonists' spiritual and psychological development through generational conflict, journeys, tensions between potential and actuality, and the search for love, a vocation, and a set of values.
Careful in retrospectively applying a foreign concept, Li devotes her second chapter to a genealogy of related Chinese works—from classical biography (zhuan 傳), through the late imperial novel, to twentieth-century coming-of-age fiction. She situates the genre's rise within the May Fourth era's youth-centered discourse, touches on canonical novellas by Ding Ling 丁玲 and Yu Dafu 郁達夫, and analyzes Ye Shengtao's 葉聖陶 Ni Huanzhi 倪換之 (1928), Lu Ling's 路翎 Children of the Rich 財主底兒女們 (1948), and Yang Mo's 楊沫 The Song of Youth 青春之歌 (1958).
The heart of Li's book is her treatment of Su Tong's and Yu Hua's works on the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. These chapters survey the authors' unflinching depictions of family dysfunction, juvenile delinquency, rape, and suicide. Beginning with “Memories of Mulberry Garden” 桑園留念 (1987), Li's third chapter presents Su Tong's oeuvre in terms of four categories: neo-historical narratives, stories of women's lives, coming-of-age works, and contemporary urban tales. After touching on several stories, Li treats at length Su's North Side Story 城北地帶 (1994) and The Boat to Redemption 河岸 (2009), winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize.
Li continues her thematic focus on fallen youth in her chapter on Yu Hua. Amidst brief treatments of “On the Road at Eighteen” 十八歲出門遠行 (1986), “The April Third Incident” 四月三日事件 (1986), and other stories, Li's longest discussion counters negative reviews of Yu's first novel, Cries in the Drizzle 在細雨中呼喊 (1991). Here and in a short section on Brothers 兄弟 (2005–06), whose lack of psychological exploration Li sees as parodying the Bildungsroman genre, Li emphasizes Yu's sympathetic portrayals of humane parents, teachers, and peer communities.
Li incorporates extended accounts of the writers' lives, and quotations from interviews and essays. She argues that their emphasis on the protagonists' autonomy, subjectivity, and individuality opposes the Party's social control and ideology of collectivism. She thus reads their works as using parody and satire to negate Party myths deployed by leftist writers from the late 1920s through the Mao era.
In her concluding chapter, Li addresses the reader's doubts about the aptness of the Bildungsroman framework for this material. She freely admits that these works “deprive the reader of the traditional educational function of Bildungsroman” (p. 188), titles her final section “Unfulfilled Bildung,” and concludes that “the ‘education’ implied in the German bildung does not really occur” (p. 206). Given that many of the protagonists' lives end by the tender age of eighteen or nineteen, might a focus on adolescent deviance or the broader term “coming of age” have served Li better than the technical term Bildungsroman? Or, if the goal is to enrich understandings of the Bildungsroman, other works Li mentions might have offered more cogent examples; good candidates include Su Tong's My Life as Emperor 我的帝王生涯 (1993), Lin Bai's 林白 One Person's War 一個人的戰爭 (1993), Chen Ran's 陳染 A Private Life 私人生活 (1996), and Yu Hua's Chronicle of a Blood Merchant 許三觀賣血記 (1996).
Throughout her discussions, Li emphasizes “the crucial tension between outwardness and inwardness” (p. 8), one of many ideas developed by Martin Swales in The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (1978), a work Li notes no fewer than 27 times. Although Li once mentions another scholar's concerns about the Bildungsroman's presumptions of an autonomous bourgeois subject (p. 23), her analyses would benefit from engaging the considerable critical scholarship on ways that language, narration, and social interactions construct the slippery notion of the self.
