Abstract
China has long and rich traditions of life writing that run from its earliest historical records to the contemporary blogosphere. Biography was, for centuries, a central strand in historical writing, and this official, public life narration co-existed with ‘social’ biographies, necrologies, hagiographies, diaries, poetry, letters, essays and other genres that contained a wealth of reflection on character, experience, identity and the life course. These were preserved in personal collections, exchanged to cement friendships and social alliances, published to promote or challenge hegemonic values, or to enhance individual or communal reputations. China scholars have drawn on this work to supplement or interrogate the orthodox historical record and have mined life narrative for insights into shifting representations of ideas or practices, into generic conventions, and into changing modes of s elf-re presentation and identity formation.1
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Notes
Recent work that relies heavily on auto/biographical material to explore late imperial and twentieth-century society includes Joseph Esherick, Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey through Chinese History (Berkeley: Uni versity of California Press, 2011)
Beata Grant, Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-century China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009)
Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)
William T. Rowe, Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Wolfgang Bauer, Das Anüitz Chinas: die Autobiographische Selbstdarstellung in der Chinesischen Literatur von ikren Anfängen bis heute (The face of China: autobiographical self-representation from its origins to the present) (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1990)
Wu Pei-yi, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)
Lynn Strave, Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers’ jaws (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Compare, for example, Phyllis E. Wachter, ‘Annual Bibliography of Works About life Writing, 1999–2000’, Biography 23.4 (2000): 695–755
Yang Zhengrun, Xiandai zhuanji xue (A modern poetics of biography) (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chubanshe, 2009).
For a concise and lucid account of Chinese history that takes seriously both internal changes and global connections, see Paul Ropp, China in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
See the essays, collected in Maureen Perkins, ed., Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Autobiographical Studies (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012)
Ii Zhanzi, ‘Di er ren cheng zai zizhuan de renji gongneng’ (The interpersonal function of second-person address in autobiography), Waiguo yu Journal of Foreign Languages) 6.6 (2000): 51–56
Quan Zhan, ‘Shiji zhi jiao: Zhongguo zhuanji wenxue de liu da redian’ (At the turn of the century: six key points in Chinese biographical literature) Huaibei zhiye jishu xueyuan xuebao (Journal of the Huaibei Professional and Technical Institute) 1.1 (2002): 34–36.
Guo Jiulin, ‘Zhongguo zhuanji wenxue fazhan gailun’ (Introduction to the development of Chinese biography), Wenyi baijia (Arts Forum) 7 (2010): 107.
Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 189–207
Denis Twitchett, ‘Chinese Biographical Writing’, in W.G. Beasley and E.G. Pulleyblank, eds., Historians of China and Japan (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 95–114.
On-cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang, Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005).
Kevin Sharpe and Stephen Zwicker, eds., ‘Introducing Lives’ in Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–28.
Lu Xun, Diary o f a Madman and Other Stories, tr. William Lyall (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 101–102.
Qian Zhongshu, Fortress Besieged, tr. Jeanne Kelly and Nathan ?. ??? (London: Penguin, 2004), 142.
Lynn A. Struve, ‘Self-Struggles of a Martyr: Memories, Dreams, and Obsessions in the Extant Diary of Huang Chunyao’, Harvard journal of Asiatic Studies 69.2 (2009): 343–394.
Critic and biographer Emil Ludwig, writing in 1936 and quoted in Laura Marcus, ‘The Newness of the ‘New Biography’, in Peter France and William St Clair, eds., Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 196.
Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 43.
Thomas Couser, Memoir: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9
Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009).
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© 2013 Marjorie Dryburgh
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Dryburgh, M. (2013). Introduction: Writing and Reading Chinese Lives. In: Dryburgh, M., Dauncey, S. (eds) Writing Lives in China, 1600–2010. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137368577_1
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