This article examines a subgenre of time-travel romance, one predominantly authored by women intended for female audience. It subverts dominant cultural discourses by re-centering female experience within historical and imaginative contexts. As a form of non-mimetic fiction aligned with the fantastic, it challenges the realist aesthetic, which continues to define Chinese literary production as a politically normative ideology. This study engages multiple intertextual and historical layers, including classical Chinese fiction, early twentieth-century modern romance, revolutionary romantic literature, popular romance conventions, and the formal logic of the fantastic. Anchored in the fantastic, it constructs dual or multiple-world structures—a heterotopian chronotope shaped by postmodern linguistic hybridity, and by the interplay of fragmented temporalities and spatialities. This investigation further considers how elements drawn from China’s imperial past, fused with modern consciousness and spatial imaginaries, generate a dialogic narrative space in which female protagonists pursue not only their romantic fulfillment but also their historical aspirations. Ultimately, the most compelling ideological impulse driving this subgenre is not merely the realization of romantic ideals but the reclamation of women’s agency within a historical framework.
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This study focuses on a specific subgenre of time-travel romance typically set in a fictitious ancient past, at an indefinite time, and in indeterminate locations, situated within the broader romance genre.
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The time-travel subgenre, in particular, involves two distinct modes of historical imaginations: one is set in a “real” historical period such as in the Qing or Tang Dynasty; the other is situated in a fictive or ahistorical temporal setting, which constitutes the focus of this article.
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This study examines the formal dynamics of time-travel romance, with particular emphasis on genre formation, cross-genre hybridity, and narrative worldbuilding as illustrated in selected works by prominent female online authors. The subgenre’s romantic genealogy is situated within an expansive literary tradition that encompasses classical Chinese romance—including Scholar-and-Beauty fiction and early twentieth-century Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction—as well as socialist romantic narratives, most notably the Revolution-Plus-Love narratives—and conventions drawn from global popular romance. Its convergence with the fantasy genre is theorized through multiple frameworks, including Bakhtin’s chronotope, Foucault’s heterotopia, established fantasy tropes, and postmodernist literary strategies. Through the synthesis of diverse romantic lineages and generic codes, time-travel romance emerges as a distinctive subgenre—one that constructs a unique romantic imaginary that was largely absent from the cultural production of socialist and early post-socialist China. This study contends that time-travel romance, as a mode of historical speculation, articulates female agency through imagined forms of historical participation and intervention, which are reconfigured through the interwoven logics of romantic idealism and utopian projection.
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the Scholar-and-Beauty tradition [...] originated in the tales of marvels of the Tang Dynasty (seventh to tenth century) and crystallized as a formal genre during the Ming and Qing dynasties. This narrative pattern typically depicts a romantic union between a talented, handsome scholar of modest social origins and a beautiful woman from an elite household. Their relationship is frequently interrupted by the scholar’s pursuit of success in the imperial examination, while familial hierarchies and sociopolitical constraints further impede their union. Resolution is achieved when the scholar attains official rank, thereby securing both social legitimacy and the right to marry. This narrative structure not only affirms the affective bond between lovers but also aligns romantic fulfillment with Confucian ideals of meritocratic advancement, social harmony, and dynastic stability.
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it was the rise of online fiction that catalyzed the emergence of a new subgenre—one that reimagines romantic sensibility and seeks to reconcile enduring tensions within Chinese romantic tradition. Departing from both the sentimentalism of earlier print traditions and the instrumentalization of love in revolutionary discourse, this digital-era romance foregrounds female empowerment through historical agency, narrative sophistication, speculative reconstruction, and utopian imagining. In doing so, it inaugurates a distinct mode of romantic imagination that is attuned to the sociopolitical conditions of contemporary China.
This subgenre of time-travel romance exemplifies the gendered dynamics of narrative production in contemporary Chinese online fiction. A representative example is Reign Supreme (serialized from 2019 to 2023) by Liuyue (2023), a contracted author with Guazi Fiction who has published seven top-ranked works.
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Although the hero is often constructed through the paradigms of traditional Chinese masculinity—anchored in homosocial bonds and expressed through the ethical imperatives of “filiality, brotherhood, and loyalty” (Song 2010, 426),11—the narrative simultaneously repudiates both the romanticized literati ideal and the aestheticized softness associated with contemporary Pan-East Asian masculinity. Attributes such as physical allure, a body molded by Western aesthetic norms, and martial prowess are accompanied by ascetic restraint and stoic resistance to female desire. These traits are elevated to the status of moral imperatives, signaling a reversal of the traditional sexual double standard: the disciplinary gaze once imposed on female sexuality is now redirected toward male embodiment. Within this moral schema, even an unintended sexual encounter may disqualify a male from attaining heroic status. Yet this reimagined masculinity also embraces emotional expressiveness, articulated through traits historically coded as feminine—tenderness, fidelity, and affective depth. Conventional female virtues—chastity, unconditional loyalty, and emotional sensitivity—are projected onto the male body, thereby reconfiguring the contours of idealized masculinity.
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Rather than constructing a coherent cartographic order, these narratives privilege the evocation of uncharted, mythic landscapes, characterized by their primordial, unspoiled, and pristine qualities. These environments are frequently mediated through the perceptions of the time-traveling heroine, who encounters an untouched ecology and organic food sources—experiences that subtly function as critiques of contemporary environmental problems.
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classical poetry is integrated across multiple textual layers. Many titles are themselves direct allusions to well-known poetic lines.
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