Gender And Subjectivities In Early Twentieth Century Chinese Literature And Culture

Through both cultural and literary analysis, this book examines gender in relation to late Qing and modern Chinese intellectuals, including Mu Shiying, Bai Wei, and Lu Xun. Tackling important, previously neglected questions, Zhu ultimately shows the resilience and malleability of Chinese modernity through its progressive views on femininity.

"Only women and inferior men are difficult to deal with." — Confucius Two thousand years after Confucius, the contributors to this book ask if Chinese women have succeeded in changing their status as the equivalent of "inferior men." Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society approaches the role of women in social change through analyzing literature and culture during the May Fourth and the Post-Cultural Revolution periods.

A feminist psychoanalytic account of changing conceptions of men and masculinity as seen in recent Chinese literature.

Jin Feng proposes that representation of the "new woman" in Communist Chinese fiction of the earlier twentieth century was paradoxically one of the ways in which male writers of the era explored, negotiated, and laid claim to their own emerging identity as "modern" intellectuals.

This is a critical inquiry into the connections between emergent feminist ideologies in China and the production of 'modern' women's writing from the demise of the last imperial dynasty to the founding of the PRC. It accentuates both well-known and under-represented literary voices who intervened in the gender debates of their generation as well as contextualises the strategies used in imagining alternative stories of female experience and potential. It asks two questions: first, how did the advent of enlightened views of gender relations and sexuality influence literary practices of 'new women' in terms of narrative forms and strategies, readership, and publication venues? Second, how do these representations attest to the way these female intellectuals engaged and expanded social and political concerns from the personal to the national?

In Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Modern China, Li Guo presents the first book-length study in English of women’s tanci fiction, the distinctive Chinese form of narrative written in rhymed lines during the late imperial to early modern period (related to, but different from, the orally performed version also called tanci) She explores the tradition through a comparative analysis of five seminal texts. Guo argues that Chinese women writers of the period position the personal within the diegesis in order to reconfigure their moral commitments and personal desires. By fashioning a “feminine” representation of subjectivity, tanci writers found a habitable space of self-expression in the male-dominated literary tradition.Through her discussion of the emergence, evolution, and impact of women’s tanci, Guo shows how historical forces acting on the formation of the genre serve as the background for an investigation of cross-dressing, self-portraiture, and authorial self-representation. Further, Guo approaches anew the concept of “woman-oriented perspective” and argues that this perspective conceptualizes a narrative framework in which the heroine (s) are endowed with mobility to exercise their talent and power as social beings as men’s equals. Such a woman-oriented perspective redefines normalized gender roles with an eye to exposing women’s potentialities to transform historical and social customs in order to engender a world with better prospects for women.

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature presents a comprehensive overview of Chinese literature from the 1910s to the present day. Featuring detailed studies of selected masterpieces, it adopts a thematic-comparative approach. By developing an innovative conceptual framework predicated on a new theory of periodization, it thus situates Chinese literature in the context of world literature, and the forces of globalization. Each section consists of a series of contributions examining the major literary genres, including fiction, poetry, essay drama and film. Offering an exciting account of the century-long process of literary modernization in China, the handbook’s themes include: Modernization of people and writing Realism, rmanticism and mdernist asthetics Chinese literature on the stage and screen Patriotism, war and revolution Feminism, liberalism and socialism Literature of reform, reflection and experimentation Literature of Taiwan, Hong Kong and new media This handbook provides an integration of biographical narrative with textual analysis, maintaining a subtle balance between comprehensive overview and in-depth examination. As such, it is an essential reference guide for all students and scholars of Chinese literature.

This dissertation theorizes "feminine space" and uses it as a parameter to examine changing visual and textual representations of "modern" Chinese women and men in selected fiction, film, and pictorial magazines over the twentieth century. "Feminine space," pertains to both male and female subjects, and signifies a discursive sphere that writers and cultural critics involuntarily dwell or consciously create to accommodate affective dynamics in narratives. I argue that such dynamics engage the "feminine" side of Chinese modernity, such as irrational emotions, sentimental selves, and bodily pleasures or discomforts of everyday life. These affective vectors have been marginalized by grand discourses that promote modernizing the Chinese nation with imported knowledge and practice of science, democracy and military reforms, ever since China was repeatedly defeated in military contests with foreign powers in late nineteenth century. The perspective of "feminine space," however, draws attention to these trivialized alternative elements of Chinese modernity, which I argue are embedded in literary and cultural productions throughout the twentieth century, including canonical works by May Fourth writers such as Lu Xun who is usually read as an advocate for teleological advancement of the modern nation. After the introductory chapter, there will be 6 other chapters to probe different aspects of the tension between body and gendered identities as played out in literary narratives and cultural debates about body, emotionality and gender identities. Chapters 2-4 focus on the textual and visual representations of Modern Girl and New Woman in order to map out aesthetics and politics conveyed through the female body and emotionality, particularly those concerning the contradiction between Chinese "national" modernity and modern Chinese femininity. The subsequent 3 chapters focus on the representations of men, examining the heritage of and resistance to wen---a pre-modern "soft" masculinity---in the formation of modern male subjectivity in the twentieth-century Chinese context.