Avant-garde fiction

Literary avant-garde movements are essentially parts of a global phenomenon, with national, historical and aesthetic differentiations. In recent years revisionist scholars started to revisit Chinese literature of the twentieth century in the light of avant-gardism having two main ways of interpretation: on the one hand the avant-garde is viewed as a political and utopian force in its own right, on the other hand it is viewed as a marker of modernity indicating an internationalist outlook. The contemporary avant-garde, of which the May Fourth period is often regarded as a precursor, ¹ can therefore be understood as both a literary phenomenon ascribed to a loose group of literary vanguards and their radical aesthetic agencies, who made their short-lived appearances in the second half of the 1980s during a critical historical juncture in post-Mao history, and also as a marker denoting a hallmark of Chinese high modernism. In both cases the development and discussion of the Chinese avant-garde has always been deeply embedded in Western concepts and notions.