This project examines self-representations of the New Woman in autobiographical fictions by twentieth-century Chinese women writers. The concept of the New Woman was incorporated into the discourse on Chinese modernity in the early decades of the twentieth century. Discourse on the New Woman became the framework within which women writers struggled to articulate their voices. Working within the paradigms of dominant discourse and finding their own language and structure of expression, women writers collectively employed the genre of autobiographical fiction to create a literature of their own that they termed "authentic literature." Through a study of women's autobiographical fictions, I investigate the relationship between gender and genre with the objective of studying the history, tradition and contributions of twentieth-century Chinese women writers to Chinese literary modernity.; This dissertation argues that the New Woman was a new fiction constructed as an emblematic sign of modernity in twentieth-century Chinese intellectual discourse, and the figures of the New Woman can be categorized into two prototypes: Su Feiya (Sofia) and Na La (Nora). Su Feiya embodies the nationalist New Woman of nu guomin while Na La represents the individualist New Woman. This dissertation presents a critical reading of the figures of the New Woman created by the woman writers Qiu Jin in Stones of the Jingwei Bird, Su Xuelin in A Suffering Heart , Su Qing in Ten Years of Marriage and Yang Mo in Song of Youth. In discussing the ways in which Chinese women responded to the New Woman while imagining their own modern identity and subjectivity, I trace the first half of twentieth-century women's writing and argue that women's self-representations of the New Woman were not only incongruent, but also constantly in conflict with the image of New Woman set forth by male intellectuals. In contrast to the prototypes of the New Women, the self of the New Woman in women's autobiographical fiction reveals greater development of ideological complexity, literary ambiguity, an awareness of social predicaments, and a sense of authentic experience. The literary texts considered in this study reflect women's contribution to Chinese literary modernity.
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