Introduction: history, memory, and phantasmal pasts
Part I parody: traditional narrative revamped
Tradition redux: parody and pathology
Return to the primitive: de-civilized origins in Han Shaogong's fiction
Interlude: the maoist (anti)tradition and the nationalist (neo)tradition
Part II citation: strategies of intertextual connection
The lyrical and the local: Shen Congwen, roots, and temporality in the lyrical tradition
Tradition in exile: allusion and quotation in Bai Xianyong's Taipei people
Back to the future: temporality and cliché in Wang Anyi's Song of everlasting sorrow
Globalized traditions: Zhu Tianxin's The ancient capital.