Web Literature and World Literature

Speaker: Professor Michel Hockx (SOAS, University of London)

Chair: Dr David Feng

This paper surveys the development of online creative writing in Mainland China in the past fifteen years. It demonstrates how online communities are bringing about unprecedented changes in the structure of the Chinese literary field, both through literary and aesthetic innovations and through challenges to the established system of publishing. Both high-end and low-end forms of literary production are taken into account. The Chinese phenomena are discussed against the background of recent debates in western scholarship about the concept of “world literature,” which so far have largely excluded online texts.
Biography

Michel Hockx (b. 1964) is Professor of Chinese at SOAS, University of London, and founding director of the SOAS China Institute. He studied Chinese language and literature at Leiden University in The Netherlands, and at Liaoning and Beijing Universities in China. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese literary communities, their publications, their values, and their interaction with state regulators. He has also published on modern Chinese poetry. His most recent monograph, Internet Literature in China, came out with Columbia University Press in 2015.

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