Abstract:
This thesis explores the powerful connections between emergent feminist ideologies of self and identity in early twentieth century China and the life narratives of Shi Pingmei, a neglected female writer. Her work, in a distinctive, extremely personal, autobiographical mode, appeared in The Wild Rose Journal (Qiangwei Zhoukan), a literary supplement to the popular Beijing newspaper, The World Daily (Shijie Ribao) which she co-edited. While scholarship on women’s autobiography and life writing of the period is dominated by masculine autobiographical paradigms and focuses on authorial intention, signature, and personal truth, this thesis examines Shi’s narratives utilising women-centred autobiographical scholarship, offering new readings of her work. Shi’s journey to autonomous subjectivity is revealed through an analysis of the textual enactment of relationships with her mother, her female friends and wider audiences. Further, by intertwining feminist scholarship on and psychoanalytical theorisations of ‘relationality’ with the Italian feminist notion of Affidamento (Entrustment), it is shown how Shi Pingmei’s texts enable, through complex narrative strategies, the creation of a textual community of modern educated female readership at a time of political instability and personal isolation for many young women. While Shi Pingmei had her own following during a career tragically cut short by illness, she was both marginalized by the contemporary critical mainstream and has been ignored by subsequent scholarship. This thesis offers a rehabilitative account of her writing and thereby claims a place for Shi within the Chinese autobiographical canon.
