The Avant-Garde Turn: On Sun Ganlu’s Novel A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains

Shuwei Fu

doi:10.62051/ijsspa.v10n7.16

Authors

Shuwei Fu School of Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200030, China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.62051/ijsspa.v10n7.16

Keywords:

Sun Ganlu, A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains, Avant-Garde, Revolutionary Historical Fiction

Abstract

Writing the full-length novel A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains, Sun Ganlu adopts a groundbreaking avant-garde stance, completing a remarkable shift from avant-garde literary experimentation to revolutionary historical narration. The successful publication of this work not only marks a transition in the writer’s personal creation, but also delivers a creative transformation scheme of avant-garde aesthetics for genre literary narration. With the self-awareness of "returning to the historical scene", Sun Ganlu frees revolutionary historical narration from the conventional grand framework. Through three-dimensional innovations in themes, narration and style, he builds a new textual form integrating popularity, avant-garde quality and historical profundity. This avant-garde shift originates not merely from the writer’s subjective awareness, but is also profoundly shaped by the changes of the times, market pressures and literary traditions. Furthermore, in this work, Sun Ganlu not only achieves innovations in revolutionary literary narration, but also accomplishes the transposition of artistic classics and the depiction of Shanghai’s spatial cultural memory. Given the insufficient multi-dimensional academic research on Sun Ganlu’s A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains, this paper takes the "avant-garde turn" as the entry point under integrated literary and contextual considerations, examines the specific manifestations of this shift in the novel, dissects its underlying causes, and explores the literary value of the work.

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