Modernist Techniques in Wang Zengqi's Fiction from the 1940s to the 1980s

This article investigates Wang Zengqi's engagement with Western and Chinese modernism from historical and textual perspectives. Seeing Wang as a novice writer caught in the transition from May Fourth to Maoist literary writing, it illustrates his complex development as a literary figure from the 1940s to the 1980s. While a historiographical investigation confirms Wang's submission to Mao's political and literary policies after 1949, the textual analysis demonstrates how he subtly polished the stream-of-consciousness techniques in his 1940s short story “Revenge” (Fuchou) following the end of the Cultural Revolution. I further explore how Wang discreetly promoted modernist writing without overtly violating political taboos in “A Night in the Sheep Pen” (Yangshe yixi) from the early 1960s. This study also engages in a critical dialogue with current scholarship on Chinese modernism, addressing the tendency to overlook distinctions among modernist approaches embraced by Chinese writers, modernist narratives crafted by translators in Western languages, and original modernist narratives by Chinese writers in Chinese. To examine cross-language facts, a significant portion of this paper is dedicated to linguistic analysis.