The Revolutionary Romanticisms of Mo Yan and Yan Lianke

Abstract Revolutionary romanticism has been one of the twentieth century’s most influential literary modes, particularly within the genealogy of socialist aesthetics. Its importance becomes particularly clear when we look beyond a Eurocentric approach to romanticism. If we take a pluralist view of romanticism as cutting across cultural traditions, then the romantic cultural nebula must also include China, where a revolutionary-romantic sensibility arose from Maoist and post-Maoist aesthetics. Significantly, Chinese revolutionary romanticism thrived in the second half of the twentieth century, after its popularity had already waned in the West and in Soviet Russia. This article examines the Chinese rendering of revolutionary romanticism during the Mao and post-Mao periods. In particular, it focuses on Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s 1986 short story “Revolutionary Romanticism” and Yan Lianke’s 2003 short story of the same name. Forms of revolutionary romanticism that appeared as a subdivision of socialist realism early in Mao’s era invoked the figure of the sublime; by contrast, Mo Yan and Yan Lianke’s engagement with revolutionary romanticism emerged in the post-Mao era and involved a rebuttal of established discourse. Through their incorporation of the absurd and uncanny, they challenged the existing order by undermining the idealistic world promised by Maoist aesthetics.