Description: A modernist icon, an object of forbidden desire, a symbol of loss and suffering, and an incorrigible survivor -- the mother takes all of these forms in Chinese literature from the 1920s and 1930s. In an innovative analysis, Sally Taylor Lieberman explores the meanings the maternal figure acquired at a particular place and time and then engages those meanings in a feminist rereading of the master narratives of modem Chinese intellectual and literary history. Lieberman cuts through the critical embarrassment that has surrounded the mother in Chinese literary studies in the West to underscore the importance of this figure to the emerging discourses of modernity, nationalism, and revolution. The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modem China is an inquiry at once historical and literary -- and unexpectedly personal -- into modern Chinese ideology and culture.

The literary texts discussed are alternately romantic and realist, canonical and noncanonical, fiction and nonfiction, female-authored and male-authored, with elite- and oppressed-class subjects. Drawing on feminist literary criticism and the theories of Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, and Sigmund Freud, Lieberman breaks traditional analytical boundaries as she explores the place of the mother in the ideological struggles through which the modem Chinese canon attained its present shape. She teases to the surface provocative contradictions that will encourage scholars of Asian studies, feminism, and literature to devise new, less guarded ways of reading.

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