Reading Wang Wenxing

"This is the first book-length study of Wang Wenxing in English. It offers biographic, cultural, textual, literary, and linguistic readings of Wang's 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. There are original contributions by Wang Wenxing illuminating 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 of their private life and the writing habits of her husband. In addition, this volume 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 literature in general."