Abstract
Since the May 4th Movement on in 1919, in China, and especially after the Cultural Revolution, the term nüxing wenxue (women s literature) has been used about anything that had to do with women and literature, no matter if it has been literature written for women, by women, about women, feminist approaches etc. And in most peoples minds in Modern China: All literature written by women has been interpreted as women s literature.
This thesis looks into some of the key articles published in Chinese literary media on how to use old and new terminology concerning women and literature, to find out what they are discussing, what Western theories they use, and in the end, to find out if they really managed to find new words to cover this great literary field. My aim has been to see if they have come to a conclusion of a new set of terminology concerning women and literature.
What is clear is that in the 1980s both Western theories on feminism and women's writing were quite new phenomena, but when Western theories were introduced to China and at the same time female authors were getting more active in the literary field, the need for more accurate definitions came apparent. After the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing in 1995, the discussions amongst Chinese theoreticians also started to appear. In the last part of the 1990s in China there have been a lot of discussions on these terms, and how to use them in literary media.
I have chosen to use the articles of three female Chinese theoreticians that all conduct research on women's literature in China. The most well known is Dai Jinhua. The other two I am concentrating on is Tan Xiang and Liu Siqian. The reason to choose these is that I consider them to have the most firm discussions on how to interpret the term women's literature/ nüxing wenxue and also how to use the other new terms.
After reading Dai Jinhua, Tan Xiang and Liu Siqian s theories and discussions on the subject I conclude that they actually do not agree upon most of the definitions on terminology concerning women s literature. They all want to put new criteria s to the definitions, but are at the same time very different from each other. They do however have one thing in common: To say that something is nüxing wenxue, it has to have a distinctly female consciousness to it. This makes me conclude that according to their definitions of nüxing wenxue, it should not anymore be interpreted as women s literature, but as feminist literature. It has to be emphasised though, that my conclusion is based only upon the thoughts of these three theoreticians, and I am aware that there might be other writers who do not that agree upon this conclusion. Generally thought, I believe that the term has got a new meaning in China since the 1990.