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Family revolution : marital strife in contemporary Chinese literature and visual culture / Hui Faye Xiao

Author
Xiao, Hui Faye
Published
Seattle ; London : University of Washington Press, [2014]
Physical Description
1 online resource (xi, 247 pages).
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Series
Language Note
English.
Contents
Preface; Introduction: Family Revolution, Divorce Representations; 1. Divorcing the Rural: Miss Science and Marital Crisis in the Reform Era; 2. Midlife Crisis and Misogynist Rhetoric: Male Intellectuals' Divorce Narratives; 3. Utopia or Dystopia?: The Sisterhood of Divorced Women; 4. What Quality Do Chinese Wives Lack? Performing Middle-Classness in Chinese-Style Divorce; 5. Seeking Second Chances in a Risk Society: The Cinema of Divorce in the New Millennium; 6. A New Divorce Culture: Rupture and Reconstruction; Appendix 1: Television Dramas about Divorce, 1990-2010. and Appendix 2: Feature Films about Divorce, 2000-2010Notes; Bibliography; Index.
Summary
"As state control of private life in China has loosened since 1980, citizens have experienced an unprecedented family revolution--an overhaul of family structure, marital practices, and gender relationships. While the nuclear family has become a privileged realm of romance and individualism symbolizing the post-revolutionary "freedoms" of economic and affective autonomy, women's roles in particular have been transformed, with the ideal "iron girl" of socialism replaced by the feminine, family-oriented "Ïgood wife and wise mother." Problems and contradictions in this new domestic culture have been exposed by China's soaring divorce rate. Reading popular "divorce narratives" in fiction, film, and TV drama, Hui Faye Xiao shows that the representation of marital discord has become a cultural battleground for competing ideologies within post-revolutionary China. While these narratives present women's cultivation of wifely and maternal qualities as the cure for family disintegration and social unrest, Xiao shows that they in fact reflect a problematic resurgence of traditional gender roles and a powerful mode of control over supposedly autonomous private life.Hui Faye Xiao is assistant professor of modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Kansas."An original and important contribution to the scholarship on Chinese culture in the post-Mao era with a breadth of perspective and depth of insight that few works have matched. A devastating critique of the social, economic, and cultural regendering of China in the reform era." -Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota"Insightfully manages to situate the chosen texts in relation to the larger contexts of ideological and socioeconomic changes." -Xueping Zhong, Tufts University"--
Subject(s)
Genre(s)
ISBN
9780295804989 (ebook)
029580498X
9780295993492 (hardback ; acid-free paper)
9780295993508 (paperback ; acid-free paper)
0295993499
0295993502
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 210-239) and index.
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