Chinese Educated Youth Literature: Ambivalent Bodies and Personal Literary Histories (Routledge Contemporary China Series)

This book explores the literary history of the zhiqing, Chinese educated youth, during the liberal 1980s era of the PRC. By incorporating personal experiences, literary representation, shared history, and theory, it argues that attention to bodies’ physical/physiological condition, as represented in their fictional works, can reveal their attitudes toward the shifting and anomalous socio-political environments, both at the time of their rustication in Mao Zedong’s era and at the time of writing about their experiences in Deng Xiaoping’s cities.It highlights the ideological transformation of educated youth writers’ malleable fictional bodies, which preserved and encoded their private ambivalence and dynamic compromises with political and literary dilemmas.By studying these "fictional bodies," this book deciphers the specific significance of labor, hunger, disability, and sexuality, negating the simplification of the fabricated embodiment as only containing and delivering iconoclastic sp