Title: Writing lives in China, 1600-2010 : histories of the elusive self /
Authors: Dauncey, Sarah, 1970-; Dryburgh, Marjorie,; Dryburgh, Marjorie,; Dauncey, Sarah, 1970-
Year: 2013
Subjects: Autobiography Chinese authors; Biography Chinese authors.; Biography as a literary form; LITERARY CRITICISM / Asian / Chinese.; LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES Composition & Creative Writing.; LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES Rhetoric.; REFERENCE Writing Skills.; China Biography History and criticism.
Abstract: "This innovative collection explores life stories produced in China between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. These essays draw on biographical and autobiographical narratives of men and women, paragons and pariahs, taken from official histories, personal diaries, plays, fiction and blogs, and use perspectives taken from life writing theory to illuminate that work. Whereas many earlier studies have emphasised the social rules of life writing in China, and suggested that lives and selves were often obscured by the weight of convention, the work in this volume shows that the rules were often actively evaded or creatively exploited by biographers and autobiographers, and suggest that a critical understanding of those evasions and exploitations can better reveal lives that were lived and written both within and against the rules of the auto/biographical game. "--
Contents: Machine generated contents note: -- List of Illustrations Preface Notes on the contributorsIntroduction: Writing and Reading Chinese Lives; Marjorie Dryburgh 1. Chinese Life Writing: Themes and Variations; Marjorie Dryburgh and Sarah Dauncey2. Self-representation in the Dramas of Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646); Alison Hardie3. How to Write a Woman's Life Into and Out of History: Wang Zhaoyuan (1763-1851) and Biographical Study in Republican China; Harriet T. Zurndorfer4. The Fugitive Self: Writing Zheng Xiaoxu, 1882-1938; Marjorie Dryburgh5. Destabilising the Truths of Revolution: Strategies of Subversion in the Autobiographical Writing of Political Women in China; Nicola Spakowski6. Zhang Xianliang: Recensions of the Self; Chloe Starr7. Whose Life is it anyway? Disabled Life Stories in Post-reform China; Sarah Dauncey8. A Look at the Margins: Autobiographical Writing in Tibetan in the People's Republic of China; Isabelle Henrion-DourcyBibliography Index.