ABSTRACT
This chapter considers only the entertainment fiction, concentrating on works from the Cultural Revolution rather than works of foreign or prerevolutionary origin. Most of the scholarship on artistic life during the Cultural Revolution emphasizes its one-dimensionality, often leaving the impression that ordinary people were exposed to nothing but the monotonous models of revolutionary art. Perry Link's study of hand-copied, underground entertainment fiction shows that during the Cultural Revolution there was a lively audience among urban youth for detective stories, spy thrillers, romances, knight errant fiction, triangular love stories, and pornography. During the years of the Cultural Revolution, one of the many puzzles for foreign scholars of Chinese literature was the question of who could possibly be reading the boring and repetitive stories being published. Probably the most widely circulated pornographic story from the Cultural Revolution is called A maiden’s heart.
