Milestones on a Golden Road

Download or read book Milestones on a Golden Road written by Richard King and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Milestones on a Golden Road, Richard King discusses pivotal works of fiction published under the watchful eye of China’s Communist regime between 1945 and 1980. Addressing questions of literary production, King looks at how writers dealt with shifting ideological demands, what indigenous and imported traditions inspired them, and how they were able to depict a utopian Communist future to their readers, as the present took a very different turn. Early “red classics” were followed by works featuring increasingly lurid images of joyful socialism, and later by fiction exposing the Mao era as an age of irrationality, arbitrary rule, and suffering – a Golden Road that had led to nowhere.