Overview

This book examines the works of four contemporary first-generation Chinese migrant writer-artists in France: François CHENG, GAO Xingjian, DAI Sijie, and SHAN Sa. They were all born in China, moved to France in their adulthood to pursue their literary and artistic ambitions, and have enjoyed the highest French and Western institutional recognitions, from the Grand Prix de la Francophonie to the Nobel Prize in Literature. They have established themselves not only as writers, but also as translators, calligraphers, painters, playwrights, and filmmakers mainly in their host country. French has become their dominant—but not only—language of literary creation (except for Gao); yet, linguistic idioms, poetic imagery, and classical thought from Chinese cultural heritage permeate their French texts and visual artworks, reflecting a strong translingual and transmedial sensibility. The book provides not only distinctive literary and artistic examples beyond existing studies of intercultural encounter, French postcolonial, and Chinese diasporic enquiries; more importantly, it formulates a theoretical model that captures the creative dynamics between the French/francophone and Chinese/sinophone spaces of articulation, thereby contributing to contemporary debates about literary and artistic production, interpretation, and circulation in the global development of comparative/world literature, as well as intermediality studies.

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9789811655647

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Reviews

“The book is overflowing with trendy concepts. … Li’s scintillating monograph is a must read for all those interested in a singular body of non-postcolonial, diasporic literature/ visual arts by a group of authors who straddle the Francophone and the Sinophone, yet stubbornly resist labels of any sort.” (Yunfei Bai, Recherche littéraire - Literary Research, Vol. 38, 2022)

Author Information

Shuangyi Li is a Lecturer in Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement: Translation and Transcultural Dialogue (2017) (International Comparative Literature Association Anna Balakian Prize 2019). He received his PhD in French at the University of Edinburgh and was selected as pensionnaire étranger at L'École Normale Supérieure, Paris (2012-13). He worked as a Swedish Research Council/Vetenskapsrådet Research Fellow at Lund University, Sweden (2019–2021).  

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