Gender in Chinese Literary Thought of the Republican Period.

The thesis is about the relationship between gender and Chinese literary thought in the Republican period, focusing on the 1920s and early 1930s. It explores the ways in which gender was described as significant to literature in writings on literature such as literary theory, literary criticism, literary debates, and literary histories. It analyses how critics and literary historians related the gendered concepts "women's literature" (funu wenxue) and "women writers" (nuzuojia) to ideas of modernity and tradition, and to ideas of truth and authenticity in literature. Chapters One and Two establish that "women's literature" was often treated as separate or different from men's literature, and investigate the discourses which provided support for this position. Chapter One shows that traditional women's poetry, as well as feminism, formed important contexts for Republican period views on gender in literature. Chapter Two argues that scientific discourse also influenced views on gender and writing. Chapters Three to Five treat Republican period views on traditional women's literature. Chapters Three and Four describe how the introduction of the genre of literary history transformed the way earlier writings by women were conceptualised, and compare how different ways of applying modern theories to traditional women's literature resulted in different historical narratives of women's literary past. Chapter Five explores the relationship between gender and the concept of "truth" in literature, as it was applied to earlier writings by women. Chapters Six and Seven discuss uses of the concept "woman writer" applied to modern women writers. Chapter Six focuses on the debates surrounding the 1929 Zhenmeishan special issue on women writers and Chapter Seven analyses how women writers were received by socialist critics. This thesis highlights the complexity and heterogeneity of writings on women's literature and women writers. It shows that although critics sometimes interpreted women's literature in terms of a break with tradition, literary traditions continued to inform writings on gender and literature. Moreover, modern theories inspired a variety of sometimes conflicting perspectives on women and literature

\u27Gaining a Voice\u27: An Interpretation of Quaker Women\u27s Writing 1740-1850

The aim of this paper is to suggest way s in which Quaker women Ministers, in a period of considerable doctrinal and secular change, used their journal writings as a tool to maintain their position within the Society of Friends. Expanding on previous work on Quaker women\u27s spiritual autobiography, it suggests that these writings were not only written for spiritual purposes but also had a temporal dimension, providing women with an authorized \u27voice\u27 through which to express their concerns. The paper explores how in these writings Quaker women represented themselves, their work and their struggles when confronted with a male hierarchy, which for both doctrinal and temporal reasons, was progressively more determined to reduce their role and influence. Using both published and unpublished journals, this study suggests that Quaker women ministers knowingly promulgated their views and concerns through their journals to a wider audience and that their writing provided a useful and powerful medium for consciousness raising, ensuring that their readers were not only alerted to the women\u27s concerns but were also encouraged to maintain the position of women within the organisation of the Society

\u27Choose Life!\u27 Quaker Metaphor and Modernity

In 2003, Grace Jantzen presented the George Richardson Lecture, the annual international lecture in Quaker studies, entitled \u27Choose Life! Early Quaker Women and Violence in Modernity\u27, which was published in Quaker Studies. It was part of her ongoing work on the preoccupation of modernity with death and violence. In the lecture she argued that Margaret Fell and most other early Quaker women encouraged a choice of life over a preoccupation with death, while most male Friends (as Quakers are also called) maintained the violent imagery of the Lamb\u27s War, the spiritual warfare that would usher in the kingdom. While both men and women developed what became the Quaker \u27peace testimony\u27 (the witness against war and outward violence), the language used by male and female Friends differed in its description of the inward spiritual life and its consequences and mission. Thus, Grace Jantzen argued that these women Friends were choosing a language counter to modernity, while the male apocalyptic was indeed counter-cultural but still within the frame of modernity. In this article, we take Grace Jantzen\u27s basic thesis, that a female \u27Choose Life!\u27 imagery may be set against a male \u27Lamb\u27s War\u27 metaphor, and apply it to four sets of Quaker data in other geographic and temporal locations, to explore the extent to which the arguments she sets out can usefully illuminate the nature of Quakerism. This four-fold approach highlights the complexity of the history of Quaker discourse, as well as the continually shifting cultural and social contexts in which Quakers necessarily found themselves embedded. It also brings to the fore how useful an analytical tool Grace Jantzen has given us and not only in situations where we come to agree with her conclusions

Continental women mystics and English readers

In 1406 Sir Henry later Lord Fitzhugh, trusted servant of King Henry IV, visited Vadstena, the Bridgettine monastery for men and women in Sweden. Vadstena was the mother-house of the Order of the Most Holy Saviour and had been founded by the controversial continental mystic St Bridget of Sweden, who had died in 1373 and had been canonized in Fitzhugh was so impressed by what he saw that he gave one of his manors near Cambridge as the future site for an English Bridgettine foundation. It was not until 1415 that Henry V, son of Henry IV, laid the foundation-stone of Syon Abbey at Twickenham in Middlesex and Fitzhugh's dream became a reality. But Fitzhugh's generous gesture is an indication of the degree of pious and aristocratic interest in the Swedish visionary and prophet in early fifteenth-century England

Maria Redux: Incarnational Readings of Sacred History (Chapter 7 of Building a New World)

Noah and the Ark. Jonah and the Big Fish. Mary\u27s yes to the Angel. Jesus\u27s yes in the Garden of Gethsemane. Pilot\u27s no and his wife\u27s please, don\u27t. Lot\u27s wife and her last, homeward look. To whom do these sto- ries belong? And how should we read them, each from our particular corner of incarnate humanity? Here is what my corner looks like: I am a woman; I am a feminist; l am a literary critic; I am a product of Westernized Christianity. I write and read from the space where these words overlap, but what does that mean when it comes to Scripture, to the stories that my tradition holds sacred? Should I be exempted from rereading, rewriting, re-spinning these stories because they are sacred? Or, is it because of their sacredness that I must continue rereading and retelling them

Unwelcome heroines : Mao Dun and Yu Dafu\u27s creations of a new Chinese woman

In this essay, I examine fictional works by two of the most influential and progressive male writers of the period—Mao Dun and Yu Dafu - to explore issues concerning the emergence of the new Chinese woman. My study will focus on Mao Dun’s story, “Chuangzao” [Creation], published in 1928, and Yu Dafu’s short novel, Ta shi yi ge ruo nuzi [She is a weak woman], written in 1932. I look at these writers’ depictions of two different types of woman and contemporary Chinese men’s reactions to a new gender relation. Male intellectuals, while heralding the advance of a new Chinese woman, were far from certain about the future of this new woman, and were troubled by further prospects of change once the “genie was out of the bottle.” They were, understandably, apprehensive over their own position in the new world order of the two sexes. Male anxiety, compounded by contemporary social and political situations, manifested itself, in part, in a shift of focus from women\u27s individual emancipation to women\u27s collective role in mass liberation. In other words, whereas nationalism remained an overarching concern, the projection of male anxiety onto women in these texts subsumed women’s individuality. In the 1930s, the May Fourth belief concerning the contribution of women\u27s liberation to national rejuvenation was being replaced by a proletarian conformity that erased gender differences. Such a shift was by no means unique; as Wendy Larson points out, the period from 1925 to 1935 [was] a transitional time when both writers and critics aligned themselves politically and socially, for or against a ‘new’ kind of socially engaged writing, and willing or unwilling to follow an overt political cause in their works”. The objective of my inquiry into this widely acknowledged shift is to investigate how two representative male writers1 works reflected conflicting and confused theories involving the incorporation of women into the project of nation building