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As China's centrally planned economy and welfare state have given way to a more loosely controlled version of “late socialism,” public concern about economic reform's downside has found expression in epic novels about official corruption and its effects. While the media shied away from dealing with these issues, novelists stepped in to fill the void. “Anti-corruption fiction” exploded onto the marketplace and into public consciousness, spawning popular films and television series until a clampdown after 2002 that ended China's first substantial realist fiction since the 1989 Beijing massacre. With frankness and imagination seldom allowed journalists, novelists have depicted the death of China's rust-belt industries, the gap between rich and poor, “social unrest”—i.e., riots—and the questionable new practices of entrenched communist party rulers. This book examines this rebirth of the Chinese political novel and its media adaptations, explaining how the works reflect contemporary Chinese life and how they embody Chinese traditions of social criticism, literary realism, and contemplation of taboo subjects. It investigates such novels and includes excerpts from personal interviews with China's three most famous anti-corruption novelists.

This book examines the career, oeuvre, and literary theories of one of the most important Caribbean writers living today. Patrick Chamoiseau’s work sheds light on the dynamic processes of creolization that have shaped Caribbean history and culture. Chamoiseau is the recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the prestigious Prix Goncourt for the epic novel Texaco. His diverse body of work, which includes plays, novels, fictionalized memoirs, treatises, and other genres of writing, offers a compelling vision of the postcolonial world from a francophone Caribbean perspective. This book is for scholars interested in francophone, Caribbean, and world literatures as well as cultural studies, and scholars and students with interests in creolization, neocolonialism, and globalization will find it particularly valuable. It brings Chamoiseau’s major works of fiction into dialogue with lesser-known texts, including unpublished theatrical works, screenplays, visual texts, and treatises. This holistic, comprehensive, and largely chronological study of Chamoiseau’s oeuvre includes analyses of various authorial strategies, especially the use of narrative masques, cross-cultural storytelling techniques, and creolizing poetics.