Overview
- Draws from comprehensive archival material
- Contributes to scholarship on social reform movements in 1920s and 1930s China
- Establishes the connected impact of journalism, literature, and the law on sociocultural discourse
Part of the book series: Chinese Literature and Culture in the World (CLCW)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Feminism, Women’s Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China focuses on a sensational elopement in the Yangzi Delta in the late 1920s to explore how middle- and lower-class members of society gained access to and appropriated otherwise alien and abstract enlightenment theories and idioms about love, marriage, and family. Via a network of communications that connected people of differing socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, non-elite women were empowered to display their new womanhood and thereby exercise their self-activating agency to mount resistance to China’s patriarchal system. Qiliang He’s text also investigates the proliferation of anti-feminist conservatisms in legal practice, scholarly discourses, media, and popular culture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Utilizing a framework of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book traverses various fields such as legal history, women’s history, popular culture/media studies, and literary studies to explore urban discourse and communication in 1920s China.
Reviews
“This is a masterful study of a critical juncture in modern Chinese history. With the infamous 1928 Huang Huiru-Lu Genrong elopement case as its focus, the book examines the multiple contradictions besetting Chinese society at that time—tradition vs. modernity; the indigenous vs. the foreign; children vs. parents; and women vs. men. It is, at once, a study of legal history, gender history, social history, and media history that casts new light on the ways in which ordinary people experienced the big changes and big ideas of the times. And scholarly merit aside, it is a terrifically fun read.” (Kathryn Bernhardt, Professor Emerita of History, University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
“He Qiliang gives Suzhou debutante Huang Huairu and Lu Genrong, the family servant with whom she eloped, and their tragic 1928-29 saga of love, prosecution, and death the insightful analysis and sympathetic retelling they have long deserved. Drawing on newspaper and magazine reportage, film, fiction, operatic and tanci performance, He examines the disparate characterizations of contemporaries, who portrayed Huang and Lu according to their particular ideological perspectives, as variously a revolutionary newwoman, casualty of female lust, and victim of seduction, in the case of Huang, and a noble lover whose passion surmounted class differences, corrupting cad, and martyr to injustice, in the case of Lu. These sundry depictions made the Huang-Lu affair a contested allegory for all partisans in the Republican era cultural war over the power of love, the structure of marriage and the family, and the reformation of the gender system.” (Peter J. Carroll, Associate Professor of History, Northwestern University, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Qiliang He is Associate Professor in History at Illinois State University, USA. He is the author of Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta Since 1949 (2012) and numerous articles on cultural history in twentieth-century China. He has also translated three books on Chinese history.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Feminism, Women's Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China
Book Subtitle: The Case of the Huang-Lu Elopement
Authors: Qiliang He
Series Title: Chinese Literature and Culture in the World
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89692-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-89691-5Published: 29 June 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-07833-1Published: 21 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-89692-2Published: 14 June 2018
Series ISSN: 2945-7254
Series E-ISSN: 2945-7262
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 299
Number of Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations
Topics: Asian Literature, Culture and Gender, Asian Culture, Asian Cinema and TV