Discourses of Disease : Writing Illness, the Mind and the Body in Modern China

This edited volume includes studies of discourses about bodily and psychiatric illness in modern China, bringing together scholarships that reconfigure the fields of history, literature, film, psychology, anthropology, and gender studies by tracing the pathological path of China through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the new millennium. Discourses of Disease: Writing Illness, the Mind and the Body in Modern China 3 Copyright 4 Dedication 5 Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 List of Figures 10 List of Contributors 11 Introduction: Disease and Discourse 15 Part 1: Hygiene and Psychosis: From Routine to Poetry 31 1: James Henderson’s Shanghai Hygiene and the British Constitution in Early Modern China 33 2: Curing Unhappiness in Revolutionary China: Optimism under Socialism and Capitalism 69 3: Metaphors unto Themselves: Mental Illness Poetics and Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Poetry 104 Part 2: Drugs and Cancers: From Nation to Fiction 135 4: Unmaking of Nationalism: Drug Addiction and Its Literary Imagination in Bi Shumin’s Novel 137 5: Narrative as Therapy: Stories of Breast Cancer by Bi Shumin and Xi Xi 165 6: Narrating Cancer, Disabilities, and aids: Yan Lianke’s Trilogy of Disease 191 Part 3: AIDS and Virus: From Film to Forum 215 7: Reluctant Transcendence: aids and the Catastrophic Condition in Gu Changwei’s Film Love for Life 217 8: Alone Together: Contagion, Stigmatization and Utopia as Therapy in Zhao Liang’s aids Documentary Together 245 9: The Unknown Virus: The Social Logic of Bio-conspiracy Theories in Contemporary China 266 Index 287 The meanings of disease have undergone such drastic changes with the introduction of modern Western medicine into China during the last two hundred years that new discourses have been invented to theorize illness, redefine health, and reconstruct classes and genders. As a consequence, medical literature is rewritten with histories of hygiene, studies of psychopathology, and stories of cancer, disabilities and pandemics. This edited volume includes studies of discourses about both bodily and psychiatric illness in modern China, bringing together ground-breaking scholarships that reconfigure the fields of history, literature, film, psychology, anthropology, and gender studies by tracing the pathological path of the ?Sick Man of East Asia? through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the new millennium.0