'Lament Everlasting': Wang Anyi's discourse on the 'ill-fated beauty,' Republican popular culture, the Shanghai Xiaojie, and Zhang Ailing

This thesis is a discourse on the Chinese author Wang Anyi's 1996 novel Lament Everlasting. In this thesis I argue that Wang Qiyao, the protagonist of Lament Everlasting, represents an ideal of beauty that was of a particular time and space, the ideal of the " Shanghai Xiaojie" that developed in Shanghai in the Republican period. In Lament Everlasting, Wang Anyi is picking up a series of themes that had been ignored by the Chinese literary community for nearly fifty years, themes that had been previously explored by the Republican era-author Zhang Ailing. Described as a Shanghai Xiaojie, and as representing the ideal of the Shanghai Xiaojie , Wang Qiyao is Wang Anyi's late twentieth century embodiment of the theme of the ill-fated beauty.