The mother and narrative politics in modern China / Sally Taylor Lieberman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lieberman, Sally Taylor.

Series:

Feminist issues (Charlottesville, Va.)

Feminist issues

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chinese fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Chinese fiction.

Mothers in literature.

Women in literature.

Physical Description:

ix, 267 pages ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 1998.

Summary:

A modernist icon, an object of forbidden desire, a symbol of loss and suffering, and an incorrigible survivor -- the mother takes all of these forms in Chinese literature from the 1920s and 1930s. In an innovative analysis, Sally Taylor Lieberman explores the meanings the maternal figure acquired at a particular place and time and then engages those meanings in a feminist rereading of the master narratives of modem Chinese intellectual and literary history. Lieberman cuts through the critical embarrassment that has surrounded the mother in Chinese literary studies in the West to underscore the importance of this figure to the emerging discourses of modernity, nationalism, and revolution. The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modem China is an inquiry at once historical and literary -- and unexpectedly personal -- into modern Chinese ideology and culture.

The literary texts discussed are alternately romantic and realist, canonical and noncanonical, fiction and nonfiction, female-authored and male-authored, with elite- and oppressed-class subjects. Drawing on feminist literary criticism and the theories of Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, and Sigmund Freud, Lieberman breaks traditional analytical boundaries as she explores the place of the mother in the ideological struggles through which the modem Chinese canon attained its present shape. She teases to the surface provocative contradictions that will encourage scholars of Asian studies, feminism, and literature to devise new, less guarded ways of reading.

Contents:

1 The Idealized Mother and the Politics of Personhood 19

2 The Father's Woman and the Rebel Son 51

3 The Mother from Hell and the Emasculated Nation-Builder 76

4 The Lost Mother and the New Woman Heroine 104

5 Birthing (during) the Revolution 134

6 The Menial Mother and the Child of Privilege 156

7 The Madwoman in the Iron House 188.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-259) and index.

ISBN:

0813917905

OCLC:

37418249