The Dan Brown Craze: An Analysis of His Formula for Thriller Fiction

Aiping Zhang · Zhenwu Zhu

May 2016 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

Since the Chinese translation of The Da Vinci Code was released in China in 2004, the “Dan Brown Craze” has swept across the country. All of Brown’s novels have subsequently been translated into Chinese and sold millions of copies. No living foreign writer has generated so much media coverage and scholarship in China within such a short period of time; not even Toni Morrison or J.K. Rowling. Brown’s rendering of dichotomies, such as science and religion, humanity and divinity, good and evil, and liberty and privacy, resonates well with his Chinese readers because they feel that these issues are no longer irrelevant to them. They see an urgent need for a revision, if not an entire redefinition, of their existing beliefs and values.

This book examines the plot, characterization, themes, setting, codes, knowledge, institutions, and techniques in his novels, and delivers a careful textual analysis, a selective dissemination of relevant information on different subjects, and a perceptive comparison between Brown and other Chinese and Western writers. As such, it shows how his thrillers have been appreciated and studied in China, and what kinds of discoveries, challenges, controversies, and insights have surfaced in the Chinese appreciation of Brown’s novels. Furthermore, the book explores why the “Dan Brown Craze” has lasted this long and exerted a broad and far-reaching impact upon the reading, writing, studying, translating, publishing, and marketing of fiction in China.

About the author

Zhenwu Zhu is Professor of English at the College of Humanities and Communication, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China. He is the distinguished discipline leader for the Comparative Literature and World Literature Program designated by the Department of Education in China. He is the author of more than ten books and 200 essays on English and American literature, including William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe and Dan Brown, and is the principal Chinese translator of all of Dan Brown’s novels.

Aiping Zhang is Professor of English at California State University, Chico, where he has been teaching American Literature since 1993. His publications include Enchanted Places: The Use of Setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction and dozens of articles and book chapters on American literature, world literature, and authors like James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Timothy Mo, Michael Collins, Gao Xingjian, Carlos Bulosan, and Jessica Hagedorn.