Written in the ruins: War and domesticity in Shanghai literature of the 1940s

During the first half of the 1940s in the Japanese-occupied city of Shanghai, women writers transformed a variety of literary and cultural forms to write the experience of war and turbulence into their new urban stories. They redefined the boundaries between life and work, formulated the material basis of the notion of femininity, and devised everyday survival strategies for women both inside and outside the household. Women writers created an important cultural space where they overtly challenged literary conventions, searched for alternatives in both literary writing and practices of everyday life, and promoted themselves as important cultural figures. Writing at a fleeting moment in modern Chinese history characterized by drastic disruption in both the larger social/political orders and in private lives, these women helped construct a vision of urban modernity which centered around women, derived mainly from the experiences of women, and concentrated on the realm of the domestic.The first two chapters of this study provide an analysis of this cultural context, with a focus on how a new body of public knowledge was shaped surrounding the marketing of women's popular journals and the formation of a women's print culture. Chapter III provides a case study of one of the most important women's popular journals of the time--Nusheng or Women's Voices (1943-1945). Chapters IV and V provide a detailed study of how women writers transformed various textual traditions from previous decades, such as the fictional autobiography and the modern essay. Conventional literary genres were reinvented as hybrid forms of representation, reflecting the growing interaction between literature and other cultural genres. These and other cultural interventions by Shanghai women persevered in the midst of the intricate political strictures and the social/economic confinements that resulted from the wartime occupation.