Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.4, 2023

Form and History: Reading Notes on Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers

(Abstract)

Zhang Tao

Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers can be seen as a spy novel with a “pioneering” narrative attitude. It tells the story of the historic evacuation of the top officials of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China from Shanghai to Ruijin in the 1930s in the form of genre literature. In the novel, Sun Ganlu uses a variety of literary resources and dialectically deals with various topics such as history and fiction, youth and revolution, faith and betrayal. The novel balances the seriousness of historical writing with the readability of genre literature. It represents a successful transformation of Sun’s creative work.