Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948


Book Description

This book works equally well in the following multiple fields: Gender Studies, Literary/Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, Asian and Pacific Studies, Chinese Studies, Critical Theory and Literary Historiography




Writing Women in Modern China


Book Description

The past few years have seen a burgeoning effort to rethink questions of women, writing, and gender in modern China. Here 22 works of fiction, drama, autobiography, essays, and poetry, each prefaced by the author's photograph and a short biographical sketch, introduce women whose literary careers coincided with an era of tremendous social, political, and cultural turbulence. 18 illustrations.




Writing Women in Modern China


Book Description

From succinct reportage of contemporary historical circumstances to comic accounts of twentieth-century urban living to carefully stylized modernist works of fiction, the selections in this anthology reflect the diversity, liveliness, humor, and surprising cosmopolitanism of women's writing from the period. This collection also reveals the ways in which women writers imagined and inscribed new meanings to Chinese feminism. Also included are biographical information on the writers, bibliographical materials, and a critical introduction by Dooling.




When "I" was Born


Book Description

In the period between the 1920s and 1940s, a genre emerged in Chinese literature that would reveal crucial contradictions in Chinese culture that still exist today. At a time of intense political conflict, Chinese women began to write autobiography, a genre that focused on personal identity and self-exploration rather than the national, collective identity that the country was championing. When "I" Was Born: Women's Autobiography in Modern China reclaims the voices of these particular writers, voices that have been misinterpreted and overlooked for decades. Tracing women writers as they move from autobiographical fiction, often self-revelatory and personal, to explicit autobiographies that focused on women's roles in public life, Jing M. Wang reveals the factors that propelled this literary movement, the roles that liberal translators and their renditions of Western life stories played, and the way in which these women writers redefined writing and gender in the stories they told. But Wang reveals another story as well: the evolving history and identity of women in modern Chinese society. When "I" Was Born adds to a growing body of important work in Chinese history and culture, women's studies, and autobiography in a global context. Writers discussed include Xie Bingying, Zhang Ailing, Yu Yinzi, Fei Pu, Lu Meiyen, Feng Heyi, Ye Qian, Bai Wei, Shi Wen, Fan Xiulin, Su Xuelin, and Lu Yin.




Women and Writing in Modern China


Book Description

Using a theoretical approach that utilizes work in literary studies, anthropology, feminist theory, and cultural studies, this book investigates how, in twentieth century China, the modern concepts of the new woman and the new writing developed into a protracted cultural debate over what and how women should and could write.




Jumping Through Hoops


Book Description

Jumping Through Hoops is a collection of nine intense and dramatic stories that sheds new light on the experiences of Chinese women during the Second World War. Originally published in Chinese in 1945, as part of Xie Bingying's classic anthology Nu zuojia zizhuan xuanji (Selected autobiographical writings by women writers), the extraordinary narratives reveal the writers' personal struggles during the years of turmoil between the Republican and Communist eras. Whether the contributors are internationally acclaimed or just rediscovered, most of these narratives are seldom found in other collections, either in Chinese or in translation.




Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction


Book Description

Women’s tanci, or “plucking rhymes,” are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest. Women tanci authors’ redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals of heroism. They establish a realistic tenor in affirming feminine domestic authority, and open up spaces for discussions of “womanly becoming,” female exceptionalism, and shifting family power structures. The vernacular mode underlying these texts yields productive possibilities of gendered self-representations, bodily valences, and dynamic performances of sexual roles. The result is a vernacular discursive frame that enables women’s appropriation and refashioning of orthodox moral values as means of self-affirmation and self-realization. Validations of women’s political activism and loyalism to the nation attest to tanci as a premium vehicle for disseminating progressive social incentives to popular audiences. Women’s tanci marks early modern writers’ endeavors to carve out a space of feminine becoming, a discursive arena of feminine appropriation, reinvention, and boundary-crossings. In this light, women’s tanci portrays gendered mobility through depictions of a heroine’s voyages or social ascent, and entails a forward-moving historical progression toward a more autonomous and vested model of feminine subjectivity.




Resisting Manchukuo


Book Description

The first book in English on women’s history in twentieth-century Manchuria, Resisting Manchukuo adds to a growing literature that challenges traditional understandings of Japanese colonialism. Norman Smith reveals the literary world of Japanese-occupied Manchuria (Manchukuo, 1932-45) and examines the lives, careers, and literary legacies of seven prolific Chinese women writers during the period. He shows how a complex blend of fear and freedom produced an environment in which Chinese women writers could articulate dissatisfaction with the overtly patriarchal and imperialist nature of the Japanese cultural agenda while working in close association with colonial institutions.




Modern Chinese Women Writers


Book Description

The essays in this volume consider the state of current writing of the world's best Chinese women writers. All the contributors relate their authors to the life and work of other contemporary Chinese women writers, and compare work coming from PRC, Taiwan and overseas Chinese. The essays make a contribution to the fields of Modern Chinese literature and women's studies, and although they are primarily intended to bear witness to the quality of women's writing, they also attempt to elucidate the complex issues of Chinese women's lives in the contemporary world.




Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580-1700


Book Description

Exploring the works of key women writers within their cultural, artistic and socio-political contexts, this book considers changes in the perception of women in early modern China. The sixteenth century brought rapid developments in technology, commerce and the publishing industry that saw women emerging in new roles as both consumers and producers of culture. This book examines the place of women in the cultural elite and in society more generally, reconstructing examples of particular women’s personal experiences, and retracing the changing roles of women from the late Ming to the early Qing era (1580-1700). Providing rich detail of exceptionally fine, interesting and engaging literary works, this book opens fascinating new windows onto the lives, dreams, nightmares, anxieties and desires of the authors and the world out of which they emerged.