Mimeses of human desire: A genealogical study of sexual desire and romantic passion as represented in twentieth century works of Chinese fiction

The following study examines literary representations of desire in works of modern Chinese fiction from the turn of the century Republican period up to the present and attempts to demonstrate how mimeses of desire offer an alternative strategy to realism in the project of deconstructing the real. Beginning with an examination of the desire discourses in The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Dream of the Red Chamber, the introduction attempts to establish the use of desire in traditional Chinese fiction as an epistemological tool in probing the limits of orthodox reality. Chapter One examines the desire discourse in the genre of popular fiction from the Republican period known as Mandarin Duck and Butterfly literature. Although often dismissed by scholars as 'fiction for comfort,' this study attempts to show how the works of Butterfly authors such as Xu Zhenya and Zhang Henshui set off a discomfiting chain of defamiliarizations by refracting amorous sentiments and love through a prism of melodramatic inflation. In Chapter 2, the focus of this study shifts to the modernist fiction of Shi Zhecun, Liu Na'ou and Mu Shiying, considered to be founders of the New Perceptionist movement of the 1930's and 1940's. This chapter explores how the modernist narratives of these three Shanghai authors probe the boundaries of reality by foregrounding issues of human sexuality and the subjective unconscious. Chapter 3 examines the transgressive potential of homoeroticism. by looking at Bai Xianyong's Niezi, a pioneering work in the representation of homosexual desire. Finally, in order to demonstrate how narratives of female desire challenge the boundaries of hegemonic discourses of the center, this study concludes by focusing on representative works of fiction by three contemporary Chinese women authors; namely Wang Anyi, Li Ang, and Shi Shuqing.