Li Jieren’s Fiction and Ripples on Dead Water

Li Jieren was born in 1891 and died in 1962, living through a tumultuous era that witnessed massive social changes arising from the two regime-changing revolutions in 1911 and 1949. During his writing career, the literary revolution of the May Fourth New Culture Movement and his experience of cosmopolitanism of the post-WWI European literature left enduring imprints on his literary and creative minds. He devoted himself to reading and translating the realist and regional fictions by Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt, and Marcel Prevost. Although he is a versatile and prolific writer, the pinnacle of Li Jieren's literary achievement is undoubtedly his novelistic masterpiece Ripples on Dead Water, which inaugurates his monumental fiction series on the 1911 Republican Revolution in Sichuan. Ripples on Dead Water took the novelist no more than seven weeks to complete in 1935.