Huang xinhao biography of martin

Professor, East Asian Studies
School of Humanities

traditional Chinese narrative, narrative theory, cultural history of late imperial China

While reading literary texts closely, I have always made special effort to historicize my readings.

In my earlier book Literati and Self-Re/Presentation, I seek for answers to the question of why the Chinese novel was becoming increasingly autobiographical during the eighteenth century, even as explicitly autobiographical writing was in decline.

I suggest that several new trends in the development of the genre (such as its accelerated “literatization” process) and the changing status of the literati contributed to the rise of this new feature of the novel. In this book, I tackle important issues such as literati self-representation and its relati