Research On R.Keith McMahon's Misers, Shrews, And Polygamists

Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-century Chinese Fiction is the American sinologist R.Keith McMahon's master work. This book researches some eighteenth-century Chinese fictions describing family,marriage and male-female relations,embodying McMahon's cognition and thinking about Chinese classical fiction.McMahon particularly analyses the household duties,human relationships and gender in these fictions,and he discovers the problem he should research into:sexual characters and male-female relations reflecting by different action patterns of people in polygamous family structure. In his opinion, authors of these fictions devised their figures and stories to give their own precepts for solving problems in polygamous families and male-female relations. On the basis of this cognition,McMahon establishes relationship among these independent fictions:they are all on the background of "polygamy or getting rid of polygamy",and prepared to reflect and solve the same problem to some degree. The internal skeleton of this monograph also begins to take shape.After analysing and summarizing different people's action patterns, McMahon uses "miser", "shrew" and "polygamist" to stand for three kinds of typical persons in these fictions. These people's actions are in the nature of obvious "activeness", lapsing from or returning to the roles convention and order give them.The vast majority of his work is given to "polygamists" and excellent women who teem in these fictions,and sometimes are even vastly superior to men. His research on these two kinds of people will be the most important object of this thesis. McMahon offers some novel visual angles for reading and analysing these Chinese classical fictions.McMahon lays particular emphasis on the text, shows his solicitude for figures in these fictions,and thinks deep for their lifestyles. Therefore,in order to introduce and comment on his work effectively,it is necessary to pay close attention to the fictions he researches in this thesis.