Competitive Discourse: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and the Meanings Generated in Ming-Qing Novels

Author: (American) Amy Lowell / Edith Wharton
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: This book analyzes five Chinese novels from the mid-17th to the mid-19th centuries, depicting the ideological and aesthetic significance embedded in the handling of social gender in Ming and Qing fiction. It points out that a gender poetics based on the Yin-Yang and Bagua system is a fundamental structural element in many Ming and Qing novels. The authors take gender as an analytical category, arguing that gender terminology originates from the meta-narrative of orthodox discourse's Yin-Yang symbolism. The book is divided into two parts: Part one elaborates on the "gender poetics system" of "orthodoxy" and "authenticity" in Ming and Qing fiction, while the second part interprets five novels: A Dream of Red Mansions, Dream of the Red Chamber, The Story of a Wild Scholar, and The Heroic Deeds of Men and Women. The authors particularly analyze how the gender patterns based on Yin-Yang symbolism give these novels structural coherence. The book's insightful thought is that the authors do not treat orthodoxy and authenticity as a categorical framework but as a process description.