Women's Writing and Self-Identity

Author: Wang Yanfang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: This book examines the contemporary Chinese women's writing of the latter half of the 20th century as an independent and open research subject. Starting from the texts of women's writing, it employs feminist, sociological, anthropological, psychoanalytic, artistic, and philosophical theoretical methods to analyze and elucidate the modes of self-identity, developmental trajectories of the psyche, and the unique narrative styles in contemporary women's writing. It indicates that the development of women's writing by the late 1990s underwent a process of the discovery, loss, search, and construction of subjectivity. When discussing women's literature, this paper generally uses the term "women's writing" rather than "women's literature," not only because it is currently a more standardized usage, but also because "women's writing" highlights the issue more effectively, namely the problem of women's self-identity. Relatedly, in the context of contemporary Chinese women's writing, not all works explicitly explore self-identity from a gender perspective, and in some works, the issue of self-identity is not prominent. Therefore, this book focuses only on the works of some female writers in literary history, which are referred to here as the research objects of "women's writing texts."