Rewriting the romance?
Xin Qu. Keble College, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford
Can romance, an affect-laden literary genre, turn anti-romantic? This paper takes up this lingering affective thread in the fieldwork as an entry point into the literary practice of fiction writing in China. This paper contributes to the field of literary anthropology more broadly by integrating affect studies, linguistic anthropology and literary studies.
Internet literature (网络文学) is a born-digital literary ecosystem in contemporary China. On literary platforms, a group of creative writers, known as internet novelists, adopts a serial form to write and (self-)publish their novels. Novelists customarily distribute for free on a daily basis their first 15–20 chapters as a literary ‘gift’ (Mauss 2002) wherefrom they segue into the economic logic of the literary industry, expecting readers to subscribe for subsequent literary instalments. Since its inception, romantic love has been recognised widely, albeit not necessarily approvingly, as an ineluctable ingredient of internet fiction.
During my two years of fieldwork in China (2022–2024), I, as a fan scholar, perceived that the ‘grammar’ of writing romances witnessed a seismic shift. More than a few literary interlocutors made no attempt to repress their contempt for romances, claiming that their current literary interests lay in those internet novels that were ‘romance-proof’ (无CP), though they acknowledged that they coveted romances in their ‘young and naïve days’ (年少无知的时候). When I confessed that I remained ‘hooked’ (Felski 2020) on romances as a reader, creative writers kindly teased me as ‘romance-brained’ (恋爱脑). In addition to these newly emerged literary terms including ‘romance-proof’ and ‘romance-brained’, anti-romantic discourses increasingly emerged within and beyond our literary community in the wake of the romance crisis. Why does (romantic) love go bankrupt in China now?
Intrigued by the unexpected ‘anti-romantic’ turn from fieldwork, I attend to the unfolding trajectory of internet literature from its romantic origins to an emergent de-romanticised sensibility. Building upon Janice Radway’s (1984) Reading the Romance, an ethnography of middle-class women’s romance reading practices in the United States, I seek to dissect the reversed act of resisting the romance in contemporary China. Tracing this rising tide of romance crisis ‘within the text’ compels me to move ‘beyond the text’. Following Paul Kroskrity’s (2000: 1–2) call for ‘the need to complement the usual preoccupation with microanalysis with an understanding of how such patterns might be related to political-economic macroprocesses’, I connect linguistic/literary ideologies (texts) with social macroprocesses (contexts): I argue that in today’s China, singlehood indexes autonomy whereas intimate relationships carry the fearful weight that even needs to be assuaged textually.
Ethnographically speaking, I seek to elaborate on how ‘unromantic’ imagination from the literary world mirrors a social mentality—or, more precisely, affectivity—unique to ‘anxious and precarious’ China (Pritzker 2024; Hillenbrand 2023; Zhang 2020; Yang 2015). Furthermore, this paper aims (1) to propose and develop an alternative theory of ‘rewriting the romance’ in line with the anti-romantic turn in China specifically and (2) to contribute to the subfield of literary anthropology more generally.
Bio: Xin Qu is a DPhil student in Anthropology at the University of Oxford, currently working on an ethnography of creative writing based on two years of fieldwork on internet literature in China. Her broader research interests include linguistic anthropology, literary theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy of language and mind, ethnographic fiction and folklore.