Description
Book SynopsisAs state control of private life in China has loosened since 1980, citizens have experienced an unprecedented family revolution. Reading popular "divorce narratives" in fiction, film, and TV drama, this book shows that the representation of marital discord has become a cultural battleground for competing ideologies within post-revolutionary China.
Trade Review"For those who do not study contemporary China or for those who need English translations or subtitles to gain access to these stories and films, this book is a gold mine...[B]ecause Xiao so frequently engages European social theory and film criticism, the book addresses the urgent need to integrate Chinese experiences and analyses into intellectual discourse that focuses primarily on the literature and films of the Americas and Europe."
-- Deborah Davis * Journal of Asian Studies *
"Hui Faye Xiao makes a significant contribution to recent scholarship on the cultural representation of marital strife in contemporary China….Combining insightful aesthetic understanding of literature and visual culture with a savvy engagement of knowledge from sociology and cultural anthropology, Xiao’s book presents important scholarship on the gendered reading of postsocialist Chinese modernity with a genealogical approach."
-- Yipeng Shen * Modern Chinese Literature and Culture *
"Through the lense of divorce narratives in literature and visual culture, the book produces an in-depth cultural study of the 'family revolution' in the People’s Republic of China between 1980 and 2010.... Divorce culture, as [Xiao's] skillful reading shows, reveals postsocialist subjects’ eager desire to move forward to a utopic future, but it always fails to deliver in reality.... Family Revolution is a well-researched book with a coherent structure, theoretically informed arguments, and intriguing close reading, making it a wonderful addition to the scholarship on postsocialist Chinese culture and/or Chinese women’s and gender studies."
-- Ping Zhu * H-Asia (H-Net) *
"Xiao is to be lauded for offering this thought-provoking volume, which analyzes “family” as a historically-situated and ideologically-mediated social institution with multifarious meanings vis-à-vis the postsocialist Chinese state-market-culture nexus."
-- Yipeng Shen * Modern Chinese Literature and Culture *
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction
1. Divorcing the Rural
2. Midlife Crisis and Misogynist Rhetoric
3. Utopia or Dystopia?
4. What Quality Do Chinese Wives Lack?
5. Seeking Second Chances in a Risk Society
6. A New Divorce Culture
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Notes
Bibliography
Index
