Engaging with revolution and love

This project aims to examine the interaction between revolution and love in Chinese fiction from the late Qing period to the contemporary era, an important manifestation of the complicated relationships between literature and politics, gender and power, modernity and tradition. My study of sexuality within the matrix of power relations questions the existing modern Chinese literary canon and explores different modes of representation that have not yet garnered the scholarly and critical attention they merit. Drawing on both the synchronical and diachronical interactions between revolution and love, I intend to move beyond linear and evolutionary historicity and established genres.; The first part of my dissertation focuses on the fashionable formula writings of "revolution plus love" that emerged from 1926 to 1935. Seeing both gender and the "revolution plus love" formula as "performative acts" (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 25), I discuss how leftist writers, female writers, and writers of the New Sensibility school responded to cultural norms with concealed modes of imitation and tackled the existing system of power using different forms of repetition and mimesis. Instead of simply categorizing this formula writing as a failure or a fixed genre, I argue that the frenetic imitations of this formula during specific historical periods provide various definitions of xiandai (modern) or modernity, and those definitions reveal the complicated cultural background against which the formula was produced. The dispersion of their formula writing especially reveals a bifurcated history, a rewriting of the official literary history of this specific era.; The second part of my study analyzes the influence of literary practices on the construction of gender roles and political norms. By first reading women's liberation as represented in late Qing fiction, I take feminist sexual identity as a site where the foreign other, national identity, and gender ambiguities uneasily collided. Second, I turn to explore how geopolitical powers produced and shaped literary practices, and how women's volatile bodies could also transgress the boundaries of space from 1937 to 1945. Third, by connecting the rewriting of "revolution plus love" with different contemporary geographic imaginations, my study reveals the limits of politics and gender identity, and the transgressions of those limits. Thus, I hope to make a significant contribution to the rewriting of Chinese literary history through textual and contextual remapping of the complicated relationship between revolution and love.