Chen, Jianhua, “A myth of violet: Zhou Shoujuan and the literary culture of Shanghai, 1911—1927”, (2002)

Title : “A myth of violet: Zhou Shoujuan and the literary culture of Shanghai, 1911—1927”,

Author(s) : Chen, Jianhua

Year : 2002

Type : Dissertation

Subject : Literature

Keywords : literature;culture;women;media;

University : PhD, Harvard University,

Language:Name : English

Support : Print

Abstract : This thesis is an inquiry into a phenomenon unique to the literary culture in 1920s Shanghai: the “violet” as a symbol of modern woman was favored by popular print media for its power sustainably arousing urban sensation and imagination. The symbol of violet was rooted in Zhou Shoujuan's early tragic love, developed by his Saturday colleagues in diverse genres, and finally blossomed as an elegant commodity through the publication of Zhou's best-selling magazine The Violet. By historicizing the Violet phenomenon during two decades, I reveal the trajectory of how the figure of the violet was fantasmagorically transformed from Zhou's self-representation to the self-representation of the city. In numerous verbal and visual representations, the Violet phenomenon became a complex semiotic web denoting a flower cult from the West, a rhetorical novelty, an icon of modern femininity, a site of popular communications, and a new mode of production. Through the web I explore the inner mechanisms of popular imagination and production, across the boundaries of literature and culture, aesthetics and politics, gender and visuality, urban physiognomy and perception, circulation and consumption. The violet saga was like a prism mirroring the rise and fall of the literary public and intimate spaces, a process in which the traditional literati world of flower, women, and poetry was reinvented in the modern era, inscribed with the agenda of the Saturday writers to reform urban mentality and culture in favor of the bourgeois ideal of the autonomous individual, domesticity, and civil society. Their literary practices demonstrated the characteristics of diversity and dynamics in using linguistic, literary, and cultural sources. While excavating the repressed history of the popular, popularity, and popular subjectivity in the context of literary modernity, I reconstruct a “structure of feeling”-the literary culture in early Republican period, whose investigatory scopes are broader than those in the current scholarship on modern Chinese popular literature. Methodologically, by focusing on the 1920s controversy between new and old literature, this thesis confronts the canon formation in the historiography of modern Chinese literature, questioning the dichotomous premises of tradition/modern, old/new, and high/low, underlying the current view that modern Chinese literature originates with the 1917 May Fourth New Literary Movement.