Reconstructing the female subject: contemporary Chinese women’s literature in English translation in the 2010s

Abstract

This thesis offers a critical exploration of contemporary Chinese women’s literature in English translation in the 2010s. Challenging the patriarchal discourse and the grand narrative of the nation state, women’s writing in postsocialist China has explored and negotiated emerging forms of female subjectivity and constructed a dynamic discursive field that embraces modernist notions like feminism, sexuality, gender relations and individualism.

In English-speaking countries, the importation of novels written by contemporary Chinese female writers also entered a dynamic era over the last decade. Providing gendered images of the Other, these works have taken part in the global cross-currents of contemporary women’s issues and feminist ideas.

Using the poststructuralist theorisation of discourse, power and the female subject to engage with rewriting theory and intersectional feminist translation studies, this thesis builds an integrated theoretical framework for examining how the female subject constituted within the socio-historical specificities and power dynamics of contemporary China is discursively reconstructed in a language that dominates in the cultural context of literary translation. Adopting a case study methodology, the thesis delves into three novels – Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls, Tie Ning’s The Bathing Women and Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium, providing an in-depth analysis of the importation process, paratextual framing and the texts of their English versions.

Through close reading, the source and target texts are comparatively examined using feminist stylistic and narratological methods, in order to reveal translation strategies utilised in mediating female subjectivities, gender representations and power relations.

The thesis aims to draw critical attention to how contemporary Chinese women’s novels in English translation serve as rewritings of gendered and intersectional dynamics of power, and to provide potentially new viewpoints for feminist translation studies and other academic fields that critically investigate Chinese women’s issues and the gendered East in translation.