The Inferno Tango: Gender Politics and Modern Chinese Poetry, 1917-1980.

Abstract

This dissertation studies the gender politics of modern Chinese intellectuals through a close examination of the problem of masculinity and the making of modern poetry from the 1910s to the 1980s. My research focuses mainly on Guo Moruo, Wen Yiduo and Chen Jingrong of the early generation and more recent poets such as Bei Dao, Mang Ke and Shu Ting who emerged from the literary activism of Today! in the late 1970s. Combining archival research, close readings and methods from gender and literary history, I analyze the formative moments in the lives of Guo and Wen during their travels abroad in the 1910s and 1920s. I also examine Chen’s encounter with the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949) as well as the underground literary activities in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) as embodied by the Today! poets.

Many factors have contributed to the Chinese poets’ construction of their newly gendered subjectivities in times of profound national crisis and transformation. I argue that the masculinity of the poetic canon in modern China was naturalized and perpetuated by the discourses of love, marriage, nationalism, revolution and industrial progress as well as by the indigenous literati tradition. I also show how a small minority of poets including men and women were inspired by Western feminist thoughts on the one hand and Daoist philosophy on the other to develop alternative positions of gender in response. With a sustained focus on gender politics, my study seeks to reinterpret the literary and cultural history of China in the twentieth century.