Strategies of modern Chinese women writers' autobiography

This is a study of twentieth-century Chinese women writers' autobiographies as they were written and received both in China and in the West. This dissertation fills a significant gap in modern Chinese literature and in the global study of autobiography by providing a full-length discussion of the autobiographical texts written by Su Xuelin, Lu Yin, Xie Bingying, Yang Buwei, and Chen Hengzhe.; In this dissertation I place their autobiographies in the historical and cultural contexts of their writing/translation while engaging in critical analysis and close reading. I treat their texts theoretically as autobiography. Therefore I question their previous use by critics as biographical material in interpreting the authors' fictions. Through tracing where their autobiographies are continuous with and where divergent from traditional Chinese life writings, this study at once brings out the embeddedness of these texts in the historical circumstances of twentieth-century China and their intricate connections with autobiographical conventions in the West. I also discuss the presence of Western autobiographical discourse in the formation of these texts in order to highlight that these texts are cross-cultural products. By engaging with both autobiographies written for Chinese audiences and those written/translated for Western audiences, this dissertation addresses issues that are relevant to literary studies, women's studies, gender studies as well as autobiography criticism and theorizing.