Avant-garde fiction

Literary avant-garde movements are essentially parts of a global phenomenon, with national, historical and aesthetic differentiations. Apart from its "historio-cultural situatedness" and "institutional becoming" avant-garde fiction refers first and foremost to a body of texts produced by individual writers and consumed by critics and readers. Chinese modern avant-garde literature made its appearance when massive globalization, commodification and de-politicization pushed the country&s;s transition from a revolutionary society into a post-socialist state. Although Sun Ganlu, Yu Hua, Su Tong, Ge Fei, Bei Chun among others are often the names dropped in the context of the Chinese avant-garde, Ma Yuan and Can Xue are generally considered to be the movement&s;s indisputable pioneers. Can Xue&s;s nightmarish stories are endowed with Kafkaesque symbols and haunted by the Maoist legacy. In the mid-1980s they hit the literary scene almost simultaneously with Ma Yuan&s;s labyrinthine narrations about roaming Tibet.