Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian is amongst the most challenging writers of the present era. He has probed the dynamics of Chinese and European literature and developed unique strategies for the writing of seventeen plays, two novels, a collection of short stories and a collection of poems. He has also written two collections of criticism. The present collection takes the title Aesthetics and Creation from the name of the Chinese collection from which most of these essays are drawn, but it also includes some of Gao's most recent unpublished essays. This book is both indispensable and inspiring reading for intellectuals and informed readers who regard themselves as citizen of the world. For academics, researchers and students engaged in the disciplines of literature and visual art studies, world literature studies, comparative literature studies, performance studies, theatre studies, cultural studies, narrative fiction studies, and studies in the history of literature and the visual arts in modern times, this book is essential and thought-provoking reading that will have many positive outcomes.This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series

Moving between the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and the tentative, limited liberties of the China of the 1990s, One Man's Bible weaves memories of a Beijing boyhood and amorous encounters in Hong Kong with a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the communist regime ? where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state. A fluid, elegant exploration of memory, One Man's Bible is a profound meditation on the essence of writing and exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit ? and on how that spirit can triumph.

This volume is an important addition to comparative literature studies with its focus on literary intercrossings between East Asia and the West.