This dissertation examines the mass consumption of Chinese female writers at the turn of the 21st century. The so-called "beauty writers" (meinu zuojia), namely the high-profile female writers born in the 1970s, created a visual spectacle through their writing and public images. Driven by desires for both self-expression and market manipulation, their novels, which are also semi-autobiographical stories, were regarded as both an alternative literature and commercialized pulp fiction. They themselves also became an interesting social phenomenon; In my dissertation, I employ an interdisciplinary approach and read the female writers as both a literary and social text. I use five central concepts to elucidate the meaning of the beauty writer phenomenon: historical image, youthful time, literary space, alternative writing and body narrative. Each is related to a different aspect of the social and cultural developments unfolding at an important moment of institutional and ideological transformation. After decades of fear of beauty as it was related to feudalism and imperialism, beauty writer phenomenon highlighted the important role that the female (self) re-construction of femininity plays in the writing of the post-revolution era.; I argue that the textual representation and market packaging of the beauty writer plays on the boundary between elitist literature and popular culture, subverting the conventional image and definition of a writer/intellectual and actualizing the personal/national fantasy of wealth pursuit and identity establishment. The textual profile of the unconventional woman represents both a cultural ideal and a cultural dilemma that corresponds to the social reality at the turn of the 21st century, and provides a vehicle for both writers and readers to participate in the imagination of a new global citizen in China. But when writing and the pretty face combine to become a form of capital and possess exchange value, the writers apparently remain entrapped in the parochial/global patriarchal order. Nevertheless, they speak up within a male dominated power structure. Crossing the borderline between the elite and the popular, they push the female self-narrative of femininity, body, and desire into a new perspective.
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