CTHULHU’S RESURGENCE AS AN EVENT: MEDIATION AND PERFORMATIVITY IN CHINESE ONLINE NOVELS

Abstract

In contemporary China, the Cthulhu Mythos has been reconfigured through online literature as a cultural practice that entwines critiques of neoliberal globalization with reflections on technological modernity. Drawing from Lovecraft’s motifs of ineffability and madness, Chinese online novels such as Lord of Mysteries and Dao of the Bizarre Immortal relocate cosmic horror into the narrative logic of time travel and digital mediation. The trope of transmigration destabilizes linear, progressivist temporalities and exposes the fragility of the rational order that underpins neoliberal techno-realism. Within this framework, madness ceases to be a pathological endpoint, as in classical Lovecraftian tales, and instead becomes a mode of action: protagonists negotiate fractured realities, oscillating between virtual and physical domains, and transform cognitive collapse into survival strategies. These works thus register the experiential conditions of the digital age, in which algorithmic systems dissolve the boundaries of subjectivity and cyberspace internalizes the asylum once located at society’s margins. At the same time, they gesture toward new symbolic orders by reframing irrationality as a performative practice through which meaning emerges from interactions between individual agency and networked technologies. In this way, Chinese Lovecraftian online fiction functions as a mediated response to cultural disorientation in the post-COVID era.