Ideology, power, text
Subtitle: self-representation and the peasant "other" in modern Chinese literature
By: Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 321
Subjects: Chinese fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Peasants in literature.
Description: The division between the scholar-gentry class and the "people" was an enduring theme of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic state. Twentieth-century elites recast this as a division between intellectuals and peasants and made the confrontation between the writing/intellectual self and the peasant "other" a central concern of literature.

The author argues that, in the process, they created the "peasantry," the downtrodden rural masses represented as proper objects of political action and shifting ideological agendas.

Throughout this transition, language or discourse has been not only a weapon of struggle but the center of controversy and contention. Because of this primacy of language, the author's main approach is the close reading or, rather, re-reading of significant narrative fictions from four literary generations to demonstrate how historical, ideological, and cultural issues are absorbed, articulated, and debated within the text.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [293]-316) and index.