Reading Wang Wenxing: Critical Essays

The first book-length study of Wang Wenxing in English offering biographic, cultural, textual, literary, and linguistic readings of his work. The essays cover topics such as Wang’s writing principles, typology of characters, analysis of lexicon, employment of stream-of-consciousness, musicality, relationship to Modernist writers of the West, relationship to Lu Xun, and issues of translating Wang’s works into Western languages. Original contributions by Wang Wenxing illuminates his own writing through a discussion of his way of reading, and a biographical essay by Ch'en Chu-yun, his wife, who shares with the reader moments in their private life and the writing habits of her husband. In addition, this manuscript appends outlines of Wang’s novels and bibliographies that are valuable to both students and scholars in their studies of Wang Wenxing’s writing in particular as well as to the understanding of Taiwanese and Chinese literatures in general.