| Positioning itself at the interaction of history, literature, gender, and theory, this dissertation centers on Chinese women's autobiographical writing in the twentieth century through examining the complex negotiations of self-identities among diverse historical forces, such as dominant discourses, literary tradition, social conventions, individual experiences, intersubjective relationships, and psychological and physical formations.Chinese women's autobiographical writings emerged in the late Qing period and flourished after the May Fourth Cultural Movement of 1919 until they virtually disappeared after 1949, with the establishment of the People's Republic of China, only to re-appear in the 1980s in various guises. The ideological and historical background plays the major role in the ups and downs of the practice. I situate Chinese women autobiographers within their specific political and historical background, reading them both as writing subjects in response/reaction to dominant ideologies and social conventions and as subjects constantly resignified by other historical forces and their own writing.In this study, I examine the effect produced by interactions among a woman's private life, her autobiographical writing, her public activities, and the dominant ideologies such as women's emancipation, nationalism, and revolution at the turn of the century (Chapter One) I compare and contrast the dominant ideologies with a particular intersubjective relationships between mothers and daughters in their different ways of constructing people's identities throughout the twentieth century (Chapters Two and Three) I also focus on the role of dominant ideology in controlling women's voices in public and the significance of Chinese women's autobiographical writing in decentralizing public discourse in the early post-Mao era (Chapter Four). The agency or subjectivity of Chinese women writers is produced neither by a prediscursive and determined identity, nor by non-historically mediated dominant discourses, but by complex negotiations and interactions among diverse historical forces.Greatly influenced and informed by feminist theories, my methodology, however, does not simply apply theories to material texts. Instead, I choose to forge dialogues and interactions between Chinese women's texts and theoretical approaches, particularly on experiences and concepts involving subjective, emotional, intersubjective, and physical dimensions. |
