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Rebel Men: Masculinity and Attitude in Postsocialist Chinese Literature

Online ISBN:
9789888754779
Print ISBN:
9789888754052
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press
Book

Rebel Men: Masculinity and Attitude in Postsocialist Chinese Literature

Pamela Hunt
Pamela Hunt
University of Oxford
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Published:
10 August 2022
Online ISBN:
9789888754779
Print ISBN:
9789888754052
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press

Abstract

This book probes the link between literary rebellion and manhood in China. Chinese literature since 1989 has been characterized as brimming with countercultural ‘attitude’. This book argues that as male writers critique the outcomes of decades of market reform, they also ask the same question: how best to be a man in the new postsocialist order? The study offers a detailed analysis of four contemporary authors in particular: Zhu Wen, Feng Tang, Xu Zechen and Han Han. It explores how all four writers show the same preoccupation with the figure of the man on the edges of society. Drawing on longstanding Chinese and global models of maverick, marginal masculinity, and responding to a desire to retain a measure of masculine authority, their characters all engage in forms of transgression that still rely heavily on heteronormative and patriarchal values. Rebel Men argues that masculinity, so often overlooked in literary analysis of contemporary China, is renegotiated, debated and agonized over, and is ultimately reconstructed as more powerful than before.

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