ABSTRACT
Su Tong’s novel Shadow of the Hunter continues his Toon Street series. It presents a postsocialist reinterpretation of Cao Xueqin’s novel Dream of the Red Chamber, remapping the romantic triangle in terms of class, gender, space, and sociohistorical contexts. The figure of mental illness and the environmental ruins inhabited by the protagonists expose the unfulfilled utopianism of Cao’s quest for pedagogic reforms. To unpack the components revealing how contemporary society is haunted by its erased pasts and reshuffled social hierarchies, this analysis employs the concept of spectral mapping. The novel’s ecogothic mode, along with its material and affective inventories, evokes a variation of the Bildungsroman genre that heralds the formation of Anthropocene subjectivities at the margins of China’s growth economy.
