Studying Imaginative Otherworlds: Chinese Fantasy Fiction, Literary Politics, and Media Creativity

Objective

Fantasy fiction is one of the most understudied areas in in the field of contemporary Chinese literature, a gap that is particularly striking given the current popularity of genres such as Eastern fantasy, science fiction, and silk punk. Over the past two decades, Chinese fantasy fiction has undergone both a quantitative surge and a qualitative transformation, evolving from a niche youth subculture into a fixture of everyday cultural life. The popularity of fantasy fiction reflects not only its mass market appeal, but also its importance in mediating contemporary debates. As a result, fantasy fiction has become a central focus of China’s soft power ambitions, but also one of the most closely monitored areas of cultural production. SINOFANTASY is the first comprehensive study to explore this thematically diverse, immensely popular, and politically sensitive literary field. Current research on fantasy fiction in China is skewed towards media analysis and often dismissive of the genre’s formulaic aesthetics and alleged disengagement from socio-political realities. Within fantasy studies there is also a strong bias towards science fiction, which has a critical pedigree in the West and addresses issues in a more realist key. SINOFANTASY addresses these knowledge gaps and biases by developing a novel, integrative approach to Chinese fantasy fiction and its role within a censored media landscape. In doing so, SINOFANTASY also makes a vital contribution to the global history of fantasy fiction. SINOFANTASY has three main goals that address the meaning, embedding, and agency of fantasy fiction: 1) to develop a historically embedded and theoretically sophisticated account of contemporary Chinese fantasy fiction; 2) to study the relationship between fantasy fiction and key socio-cultural and political developments and debates of the postsocialist period; 3) to analyze the role of fantasy fiction and practices of fantasy fandom within the wider Chinese mediasphere.