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HOME > Archives > 2025 > Volume 11 Number 5 (2025) >
IJLLL 2025 Vol.11(5): 202-208
DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL.2025.11.5.601

Rewriting Tradition: Yu Hua’ s Avant-garde Transformation of Crime Fiction in Mistakes by the River

Wenli Xu
Center for China Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
Email: xuwl_2023@163.com (W.L.X.)

Manuscript received March 10, 2025; accepted August 7, 2025; published September 18, 2025.

Abstract—As one of China’s most renowned avant-garde writers, Yu Hua adopts a stark and detached narrative style in his early works, depicting scenes of violence, bloodshed, and death to highlight the absurdity of human existence. This stylistic choice stems from his selective adaptation and transformation of Chinese classical literature. Using Mistakes by the River as a case study, this paper examines Yu Hua’s literary choices, analyzing how he both subverts and reconstructs narrative conventions to achieve a distinctive avant-garde quality. This study argues that Yu Hua reconfigures and integrates elements of traditional Chinese crime and detective fiction through three key aspects—plot structure, character portrayal, and narrative perspective. In doing so, he dismantles the rationality and moral justice typically upheld by these genres. In this so-called “crime novel,” truth remains elusive, justice is never served, and the protagonist’s investigative process is riddled with inconsistencies—ultimately constructing a world governed by irrationality.

Keywords—avant-garde literature, Yu Hua, crime depiction, narrative subversion, irrationality

Cite: Wenli Xu, "Rewriting Tradition: Yu Hua’ s Avant-garde Transformation of Crime Fiction in Mistakes by the River," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 202-208, 2025.

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

 

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