Writing Lives in China, 1600-2010 : Histories of the Elusive Self

The origins of this volume lie in conversations conducted over many years that led us to consider the meanings and uses of life stories written in China or about Chinese people, past and present. Many of these conversations were not, at first, about life writing in its own right, but about the ways in which life stories of self or others featured in our work -as illustrations of social change, eye-witness accounts of historical events, challenges to hegemonic narratives or supplements to fragmentary archival records -and the challenges inherent in drawing these personal stories into understandings of wider changes. The advice offered to scholars on the use of these life narratives was often cautious, and sometimes discouraging. Life narratives -whoever their authors or intended audiences -might be of some interest, but they were to be understood as lesser sources: less robust, less objective and less 'representative' as historical sources than the archival record; of less 'literary' value and interest than fiction, drama or poetry; less revealing, because of distinctively Chinese generic traditions, of lives and selves than auto/biographical work produced elsewhere.However, the volume of extant works -some now available in translation, others not -pointed to powerful personal, social and political interests that underlay auto/biographical production; and the relatively recent proliferation of critical and theoretical studies of life narrative across cultures offered increasingly sophisticated tools for disentangling those interests. Despite those warnings, therefore, it seemed more productive to engage with those supposedly imperfect auto/biographical artefacts, to understand how and why they were produced and what effects they were designed to achieve, than simply to set them aside or lament their shortcomings. The new conversation that this work stimulated led more or less directly to the interdisciplinary international workshop, Writing Lives in China, "This innovative collection explores life stories produced in China between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. These essays draw on biographical and autobiographical narratives of men and women, paragons and pariahs, taken from official histories, personal diaries, plays, fiction and blogs, and use perspectives taken from life writing theory to illuminate that work. Whereas many earlier studies have emphasised the social rules of life writing in China, and suggested that lives and selves were often obscured by the weight of convention, the work in this volume shows that the rules were often actively evaded or creatively exploited by biographers and autobiographers, and suggest that a critical understanding of those evasions and exploitations can better reveal lives that were lived and written both within and against the rules of the auto/biographical game."-- Provided by publisher Front Matter....Pages i-xii Introduction: Writing and Reading Chinese Lives....Pages 1-20 Chinese Life Writing: Themes and Variations....Pages 21-56 Self-representation in the Dramas of Ruan Dacheng (1587–1646)....Pages 57-85 How to Write a Woman’s Life Into and Out of History: Wang Zhaoyuan (1763–1851) and Biographical Study in Republican China....Pages 86-109 The Fugitive Self: Writing Zheng Xiaoxu, 1882–1938....Pages 110-132 Destabilising the Truths of Revolution: Strategies of Subversion in the Autobiographical Writing of Political Women in China....Pages 133-158 Zhang Xianliang: Recensions of the Self....Pages 159-181 Whose Life Is It Anyway? Disabled Life Stories in Post-reform China....Pages 182-205 A Look at the Margins: Autobiographical Writing in Tibetan in the People’s Republic of China....Pages 206-235 Back Matter....Pages 236-265 This innovative collection explores the life stories of Chinese women and men between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on both biographical and autobiographical narratives and on perspectives taken from life writing theory to ask how lives were lived and written within and against the rules of the auto/biographical game.