Rebel men : masculinity and attitude in postsocialist Chinese literature  Rebel Men: Masculinity and Attitude in Postsocialist Chinese Literature 

• Product Details

  Product #

  2566658B

  Author(s)

  Hunt, Pamela

  City

  Hong Kong 

  Country

  Hong Kong 

  Language

  English 

  ISBN

  9789888754052 

  Date of Publication

  2022 

  Publisher

  Hong Kong University Press  

  Cover Type

  Hard cover 

  Pages

  154 

  Subject

  Literary Criticism

  Subject

  Sociology

   

• Product Details in Original Language

  Author

  Hunt, Pamela

  Publisher

  Hong Kong University Press  

• Description

  Rebel Men: Masculinity and Attitude in Postsocialist Chinese Literature Masculinity, fast-changing and regularly declared to be in the throes of crisis, is attracting more popular and scholarly debate in China than ever before. At the same time, Chinese literature since 1989 has been characterized as brimming with countercultural ‘attitude’. This book probes the link between literary rebellion and manhood in China, showing how, 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? In this first full-length discussion of masculinity in post-1989 Chinese literature, Pamela Hunt offers a detailed analysis of four contemporary authors in particular: Zhu Wen, Feng Tang, Xu Zechen, and Han Han. In a series of insightful readings, she 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, as well as 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, continues to be renegotiated, debated, and agonized over, and is ultimately reconstructed as more powerful than before.