Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s-1930s (Transnational Asian Masculinities) - Hardcover

Lei, Jun

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9888528742 ISBN 13: 9789888528745

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press, 2021

Synopsis

The crisis of masculinity surfaced and converged with the crisis of the nation in the late Qing, after the doors of China were forced open by Opium Wars. The power of physical aggression increasingly overshadowed literary attainments and became a new imperative of male honor in the late Qing and early Republican China. Afflicted with anxiety and indignation about their increasingly effeminate image as perceived by Western colonial powers, Chinese intellectuals strategically distanced themselves from the old literati and reassessed their positions vis-à-vis violence. In Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s-1930s, Jun Lei explores the formation and evolution of modern Chinese intellectual masculinities as constituted in racial, gender, and class discourses mediated by the West and Japan. This book brings to light a new area of interest in the "Man Question" within gender studies in which women have typically been the focus. To fully reveal the evolving masculine models of a "scholar-warrior," this book employs an innovative methodology that combines theoretical vigor, archival research, and analysis of literary texts and visuals. Situating the changing inter- and intra-gender relations in modern Chinese history and Chinese literary and cultural modernism, the book engages critically with male subjectivity in relation to other pivotal issues such as semi-coloniality, psychoanalysis, modern love, feminism, and urbanization.

About this title

About the Author

Jun Lei is assistant professor of Chinese in the department of international studies at Texas A&M University. She is the coauthor of First Step: An Elementary Reader for Modern Chinese and First Step: Workbook for Modern Chinese.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9888528742
• ISBN 13: 9789888528745
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240