Description:
Introduction. The subordination of yanyi ; Canonizing revolution ; The new historical fiction -- Towards a delineation. Alternative histories ; Historiographic metafictions -- The tyranny of time. The birth of a temporal logic ; The Enlightenment legacy in retrospection ; Modernity and its discontents -- The proliferation of hetertopias. Mapping the geographies of the NHF ; The spatialization of time -- Writing decadence as allegory. Chinese decadence revisited ; Allegorizing historical decadence ; A rhetoric of sickness -- Constructing a "clean spirit". Writing in the Musilm way ; Aestheicizing pessimism and heterodoxy ; Journey to conversion -- Writing the peripheral into dictionary. The spatial form ; Fragments ; Rewriting history ; The power of words ; Dilemma -- History, fiction, and metafiction. Sexing Chinese history ; Living in totalitarian terror ; Intertextuality, memory and amnesia -- Conclusion : straddling traditionality and postmodernity