The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren: The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China

Engaged with the paradigms of cultural geography, local history, spatial politics, and everyday life, The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren unveils a Sichuan writer’s lifelong quest: an independent historical fiction writing project on Chengdu from the turn of the century through China’s 1911 Revolution. Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng’s study illuminates the crisis of writing home in a globalized age by rescuing Li Jieren’s repeatedly revised but never finished river-novel series written from Republican to Communist China, struggling to liberate local memory from the national cum revolutionary currents. The book undercuts official historiography and rewrites Chinese literary history from the ground up by highlighting Li’s resilient geopoetics of writing that decenters the nation by adopting the place-based view of a distant province.