Feminism, Women's Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China - The Case of the Huang-Lu Elopement

Feminism, Women's Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China focuses on a sensational elopement in the Yangzi Delta in the late 1920s to explore how middle- and lower-class members of society gained access to and appropriated otherwise alien and abstract enlightenment theories and idioms about love, marriage, and family. Via a network of communications that connected people of differing socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, non-elite women were empowered to display their new womanhood and thereby exercise their self-activating agency to mount resistance to China's patriarchal system. Qiliang He's text also investigates the proliferation of anti-feminist conservatisms in legal practice, scholarly discourses, media, and popular culture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Utilizing a framework of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book traverses various fields such as legal history, women's history, popular culture/media studies, and literary studies to explore urban discourse and communication in 1920s China.
 

List of contents

Chapter 0: Introduction.- Chapter 1: In Search of Women's Agency in Everyday Life: The Construction of the Huang-Lu Love Affair in the Press.- Chapter 2: The Trials of Lu Genrong: The Criminal Law Reform and Women's Agency in Late 1920s China.- Chapter 3: Polysemy: Discussions and Debates on the Huang-Lu Love Affair.- Chapter 4: Polyphony: Vernacularized Feminisms and the Urban Network of Communication.- Chapter 5: Vernacularization as Global and Local Experiences: The Huang-Lu Affair in Film and Literature.- Chapter 6: Conclusion.

About the author

Qiliang He is Associate Professor in History at Illinois State University, USA. He is the author of Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta Since 1949 (2012) and numerous articles on cultural history in twentieth-century China. He has also translated three books on Chinese history.

Summary

Draws from comprehensive archival material
Contributes to scholarship on social reform movements in 1920s and 1930s China
Establishes the connected impact of journalism, literature, and the law on sociocultural discourse

Product details

• Authors: Qiliang He
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.01.2018
• EAN: 9783319896915
• ISBN: 978-3-31-989691-5
• No. of pages: 299
• Dimensions: 154 mm x 216 mm x 22 mm
• Weight: 550 g
• Illustrations: XVI, 299 p. 10 illus.
• Series: Chinese Literature and Culture in the World; Chinese Literature and Culture in the World
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > Other languages / Other literatures; Asien, Darstellende Künste, B, Kulturwissenschaften, Gender, Culture, Cultural Studies, Performing Arts, Gender Studies: Gruppen, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Asian Culture, Ethnology—Asia, Gender and Culture, Culture and Gender, Oriental literature, Asian Literature, Motion pictures—Asia, Asian Film and TV, Asian Cinema and TV