Experimental Chinese Literature

Experimental Chinese Literature is the first theoretical account of material poetics from the dual perspectives of translation and technology. Focusing on a range of works by contemporary Chinese authors including Hsia Yü, Chen Li, and Xu Bing, Tong King Lee explores how experimental writers engage their readers in multimodal reading experiences by turning translation into a method and by exploiting various technologies.

The key innovation of this book rests with its conceptualisation of translation and technology as spectrums that interact in different ways to create sensuous, embodied texts. Drawing on a broad range of fields such as literary criticism, multimodal studies, and translation, Tong King Lee advances the notion of the translational text, which features transculturality and intersemioticity in its production and reception.

Tong King Lee, Ph.D. (2009), University of Queensland, is Assistant Professor of Translation at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Translating the Multilingual City (2013) as well as several articles on experimental poetics and translation studies.

"A clear and wideranging exposition of these issues in the Chinese-language context, Lee's book is a welcome change and addition to the more usual focus on the artistic practices of experimental writers and text-based artists in Europe and North America."
-Adam Jaworski, The University of Hong Kong, in Journal of Oriental Studies, Vol. 50, Iss. 1.