Literature and Modern China

Review of Li Yi’s Republican China as Method (Zuowei fangfa de minguo 作為方法的民國)

Ruirui Zhang — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700

Li Yi’s book Republican China as a Method serves as an innovative research method to deeply understand modern Chinese literature. It emphasizes the interaction between the materialistic social and cultural mechanism and the spiritual and personal creativity of literary creation. Although it only provides a start of the theoretical research paradigm, it presents a brave attempt by Mainland Chinese scholars to pursue subjective research.

Lu Xun, a “Knot” that Pulls Together China’s Modernity

Yi Li; Sophia Kidd — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700

The impact of Lu Xun on modern Chinese literature is complex, which permeates every branch of modern Chinese literature and connects them with itself as a junction. Tracing the logical web of Lu Xun’s thoughts helps reveal a grand landscape of modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun’s ability to move us with his spiritual pursuit after more than half a century symbolizes his trans-epochal value as well as our own self-growth.

Late Qing Feminist Discourse and Natiionalism

Lianfen Yang; Sophia Kidd — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700

Chinese feminist discourse began its development embedded within late Qing period nationalist discourse in the form of proscriptions against foot-binding and advocacy for women’s education. Specific rhetorical terms conflating feminist and nationalist discourse include “mothers of citizens (guomin zhi mu 國民之母)” and “women citizens (nü guomin女國民).” This paper analyzes ways in which feminism was embedded in nationalist discourse and the legitimacy this established for the women’s movement. Such an inquiry uncovers the dependence of feminist discourse upon nationalist discourse, contributing to the unique development of feminism in China. This paper also looks at gender anxiety in Qiu Jin (秋瑾, 1875-1907) in an attempt to describe how male subjectivity influenced late Qing feminist discourse.

Not Just Tears and Laughter

Fangyuan Huang — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700

This article rethinks the spatiality of emotions through the lens of Zhang Henshui’s Fate in Tears and Laughter, one of the most popular novels in the Republican era (1911-1949). Drawing on Ling Hon Lam’s work on the spatiality of emotion in premodern Chinese theater, this study reformulates emotion as a space that transposes an affective body into a spectatorial position in front of the emotion-realm mediated by theatricality. This article sets out to delineate the melodramatic polarization of emotions (tears and laughter), the spatial topography of emotion embedded in geographical loci, and the emotional spectatorship in which a private self is enmeshed in a public domain through bodily engagement in laughing, crying and sympathizing with fictional characters. It contributes to a new understanding of the affective assembly of emotions evoked by reading experiences that is as much innate faculties as coded registers of an imagined community.

Love, Betrayal, and Death

Qian Liu — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700

What is the relationship between art and life, theatre and history? Two contemporary works, David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly and Chen Kaige’s film Farewell My Concubine, raise this question with men’s cross-dressing performances of tragic heroines, which complicate different theatrical aesthetics and intertwine theater with fictionalized reality based on actual historical events. By presenting twists of characters’ real-life relationships entwined with Western and Eastern operatic fantasies, Hwang and Chen complicate the 19th-century European romantic opera cliché of “tragic women dying for love” and classical Chinese theatrical aesthetics of presentational performances. The intertwining of art and life, in evolving theatrical performances contextualized in the 20th-century history, reveals situations of irony in the lives of minor characters caught in grand historical movements. The cultural figures of tragic heroines allegorized by histories channel East and West in characters’ suspected betrayals and deaths, offering cultural translation and historical allegories. This paper examines how male characters perform tragic female roles to mediate their relationships to others and respond to given realities. Whereas previous discussions focus on general gender politics, my approach to the East-West tension through comparing aesthetic traditions and histories evolved in performances will offer the subtlety previously neglected. Reading through the lens of various crossings redefines the dichotomous East-West tension as a relationship of mutual inclusion and reveals the West’s underestimation of the East in the past decades. The undervalued theatrical power to replace reality at the end of both works enables us to read individuals’ operatic suicides as self-salvation and Hwang’s character Song’s survival, ironically, as a tragedy.