Representing Chinese men: Male subjectivity and issues of modernity in contemporary Chinese literature

This dissertation studies the literary representations of men in Chinese literature of the 1980s. It focuses on the relationship between anxiety felt by Chinese (male) intellectuals (youhuan yishi) and its manifestations in literary representations of men. After a preliminary discussion of the historical and theoretical aspects of the construction of Chinese male subjectivity, the dissertation addresses, from a gendered perspective, the following issues: Chinese male identity crisis and its conflation with Chinese cultural crisis, the male desire to search for the "self" and "cultural roots," and the male desire to rediscover a "masculine" identity. It also examines how all of these are manifestations of Chinese intellectuals' century-long struggle to come to terms with modernity. The dissertation concludes with speculation about the evolution of Chinese male subjectivity amidst the recent economic changes in China.