The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction

Jin Feng addresses both the general and the specialized audience of fiction in early-twentieth-century Chinese fiction in three ways: for scholars of the May Fourth period, Feng redresses the emphasis on the simplistic, gender-neutral representation of the new women by re-reading selected texts in the light of marginalized discourse and by an analysis of the evolving strategies of narrative deployment; for those working in the area of feminism and literary studies, Feng develops a new method of studying the representation of Chinese women through an interrogation of narrative permutations, ideological discourses, and gender relationships; and for studies of modernity and modernization, the author presents a more complex picture of the relationships of modern Chinese intellectuals to their cultural past and of women writers to a literary tradition dominated by men.