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

Electronic band gaps and transport in aperiodic graphene superlattices of Thue-Morse sequence

We have studied the electronic properties in aperiodic graphene superlattices of Thue-Morse sequence. Although the structure is aperiodic, an unusual Dirac point (DP) does exist and its location is exactly at the position of the zero-averaged wave number (zero-$\bar{k})$. Furthermore, the zero-$\bar{k}$ gap associated with the DP is robust against the lattice constants and the incident angles, and multi-DPs can appear under the suitable conditions. A resultant controllability of electron transport in Thue-Morse sequence is predicted, which may facilitate the development of many graphene-based electronics.Comment: Accepted for publication in Applied Physics Letters; 4 pagese, 5 figure

Nonlinear fractional equations with supercritical growth

We obtain existence of infinitely many solutions for a fractional differential equation with indefinite concave nonlinearities and supercritical growth

Numerical characterization of protein sequences based on the generalized Chou\u27s pseudo amino acid composition

The technique of comparison and analysis of biological sequences is playing an increasingly important role in the field of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. One of the key steps in developing the technique is to identify an appropriate manner to represent a biological sequence. In this paper, on the basis of three physical-chemical properties of amino acids, a protein primary sequence is reduced into a six-letter sequence, and then a set of elements which reflect the global and local sequence-order information is extracted. Combining these elements with the frequencies of 20 native amino acids, a (21+λ) dimensional vector is constructed to characterize the protein sequence. The utility of the proposed approach is illustrated by phylogenetic analysis and identification of DNA-binding proteins