On The Historical Development Of Feminist Literary Criticism Of The New Age

Chinese feminist literary criticism (FLC), emerging in the 1980s, has developed to be one of the most conspicuous achievements in China's contemporary academic research. Its progress is reflected in the following aspects: a large number of critic groups unprecedentedly turn up to devote to feminist literature in the literary field. Male and female critics of "three generations live under the same roof and compete with each other. With more than twenty years' practice, they have gained a lot, and the field has gradually grown to be an academic sphere with distinguishing features. Many monographs and papers concerned with FLC have been published, which reflect the incipient accomplishments in the field. All of these demonstrate that the FLC in the new period has become mature and conscious. It is literary critics' urgent and important task to do research on it. The study will be beneficial for scholars to penetrate into the criticism, and push the research forward in the future. The FLC will become profound and prosperous by the studies. At the same time, feminist literature will be easy to construct as a branch of learning and literary criticism will get its fast development.The thesis treats FLC as a floating system. Floating refers to the continuous changes with characteristics of each stage. System means that there are relationships between stages. Even at the same stage, feminist criticism is complicatedly related to other literary thoughts, social trends and literary creation. The thesis adopts the diachronic perspective, together with feminist literary theory, artistic psychology, social criticism, and comparative approach, to analyse the criticism systematically and scientifically with a lot of firsthand materials. Following the history of its occurrence and development, this paper discusses the criticism's localization, the specific expressions and contributing factors to the localization. And the writer gives some insightful ideas on the controversial issues about the criticism, with reference to some historical materials.FLC of the new age has generally experienced three developing stages: aesthetic criticism, man criticism and diversified criticism. As western feminist criticism is closely connected with women's liberation movement, western feminists set the man criticism as their first revolution object. Later feminist aesthetics and self-criticism come to the stage. In China, the beginning of feminism was more expressed as repercussions on feminist literature. As a result, feminism presented a tendency of aesthetic flavour. Critics neglected man criticism and self-criticism. Instead, they paid much attention to find aesthetic characteristics of feminist literature. Later, with the arrival of western feminism, Chinese feminist criticism began to stress man criticism at the second stage. It was with distinct social ideology. When it enters the third stage, those feminist critics calm themselves down from years of excitement and enthusiasm in discussing it. Now it is endowed with poststructural diversity. They become open-minded and their criticism aims at women's value in the world. Openness is an attitude, but more of a mood. It is the subject's psychological expression of confidence, optimism and calmness. It is only when the subject is confident for herself that she can accept all that is profitable for her wholeheartedly, which is also a symbol of the subject's mature psyche. Feminism's coming into bloom reflects its liberal attitude as well as its optimism and confidence. The diversity of the criticism symbolizes the gradual maturity of it. It also proves that our country's feminist literary criticism has been successfully converted from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. After consistent and difficult explorations, Chinese feminism eventually walks out from the early confusing chaos, and escapes from the tragic fate to be dismissed. It finally comes to an instant illuminating world, while it determinesits ideological orientation.The thesis consists of five parts. Introduction discusses its research objects and values. On the basis of the achievements, characteristics and weak points of feminism, the writer gives her unique research perspective, the train of thought and arguments. Chapter One introduces the features of contemporary feminism at its early stage and reasons for the formation of the features. Chapter Two deals with the features and causes of feminism at its developing stage from four aspects: the disputes of feminist criticism, new critical space, rereading of literary history, and western feminism. Chapter three analyzes its characteristics in the mature period from the invention of "binary harmonious world", "criticism with body writing" and "compound language". Conclusion puts forward that the developing trend of Chinese feminism is to pursue the beauty of magnificence and profundity, create powerful and grand styles of writing. Chinese feminist literary criticism will contribute to the developing critical culture from a distinctive aspect.