Wang Anyi's 'The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai', a Shishi Novel of the 1990

This study is a close reading, through selected passages, of Wang Anyi's novel chang hen ge, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai. It uses the English translation of Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan and Wang Anyi's original Chinese text. This study is informed by other works of fiction set in Shanghai and by various works of literary analysis.;Reading The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (chang hen ge) as a shishi (poet-historian) novel of the 1990s posits that, as a writer of the Cultural Revolution's Lost Generation, Wang creates a poetic allusion to convey the pain experienced in contemplating the imposed historiographies of her lifetime, historiographies that forestall a close examination of the Cultural Revolution and erase the 1989 Tian Anmen events. The elegiac reference to the past and allusion to the present are achieved in the novel through the author's appropriation of the poetic genre of huaigu, a meditation on the past. The creation of the narrator as a poet-storyteller persona allows for a metatext on the moral implication of historical amnesia. The metatext on historiography and the elegiac evocation of sorrow through huaigu are key features that confer a shishi (poet-historian) quality to Wang Anyi's novel. (Chinese characters removed).