{"product_id":"ideology-power-text-self-representation-and-the-peasant-other-in-modern-chinese-literature-9780804733199","title":"Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant 'Other' in Modern Chinese Literature","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): Yi-Tsi Mei Feuerwerker\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Stanford University Press\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Stanford University Press\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: Asian - General\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe division between the scholar-gentry class and the \"people\" was an enduring theme of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic state. Twentieth-century elites recast this as a division between intellectuals and peasants and made the confrontation between the writing\/intellectual self and the peasant \"other\" a central concern of literature. The author argues that, in the process, they created the \"peasantry,\" the downtrodden rural masses represented as proper objects of political action and shifting ideological agendas.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThroughout this transition, language or discourse has been not only a weapon of struggle but the center of controversy and contention. Because of this primacy of language, the author's main approach is the close reading or, rather, re-reading of significant narrative fictions from four literary generations to demonstrate how historical, ideological, and cultural issues are absorbed, articulated, and debated within the text.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThree chapters each focus on one representative author. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881-1936), which initiated the literary preoccupation with the victimized peasant, is also about the identity crisis of the intellectual. Zhao Shuli (1906-1970), upheld by the Communist Party as a model \"peasant writer,\" tragically exemplifies in his career the inherent contradictions of such an assigned role. In the post-Mao era, Gao Xiaosheng (1928--) uses the ironic play of language to present a more ambiguous peasant while deflating intellectual pretensions. The chapter on the last of the four \"generations\" examines several texts by Mo Yan (1956--), Han Shaogong (1952--), and Wang Anyi (1954--) as examples of \"root-searching\" fiction from the mid-1980's. While reaching back into the past, this fiction is paradoxically also experimental in technique: the encounter with the peasant leads to questions about the self-construction of the intellectual and the nature of narrative representation itself.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThroughout, the focus is on texts in which some sort of representation or stand-in of the writer\/intellectual self is present--as character, as witness, as center of consciousness, or as first-person or obtrusive narrator. Each story catches the writer in a self-reflective mode, the confrontation with the peasant \"other\" providing a theater for acting out varying dramas of identity, power, ideology, political engagement, and self-representation.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Stanford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":47614621319319,"sku":"9780804733199","price":9295.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9780804733199.webp?v=1775095023","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/ideology-power-text-self-representation-and-the-peasant-other-in-modern-chinese-literature-9780804733199","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}