Kristin Stapleton. Fact in Fiction

Ba Jin is the pen name of the enormously popular Chinese writer Li Yaotang. He was an iconoclast and an anarchist; his pen name is a combination of the names of the anarchists Bakunin and Kropotkin. Ba Jin’s most famous novels are the trilogy Turbulent Stream. They are set among a wealthy family in a provincial city in western China a decade after the revolution (of 1911) that brought the last dynasty to an end. The novels inspired two generations of educated young people to reject the traditional order and to break away from their families. Sadly, there is no good translation of the novels in English, but Kristin Stapleton’s imaginative companion to the novels is almost an improvement on the novels themselves. Stapleton has found a fascinating way to use fiction to enhance fact. Fact and Fiction sets Ba Jin’s novels in their historical and social context. In the process she cools the melodrama that punctuates the novels and that has led some literary critics to disparage them.

Art · China · Context (archaeology) · Literature · Order (exchange) · Trilogy · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies