The Modern Girl in Modern Chinese Literature

The literary representation of the Modern Girl in Republican China is one of the most generative questions in modern Chinese studies. This chapter reestablishes the linkages between fictional representation and certain motifs that ran through the cacophonous mass media debate over the Modern Girl during the 1930s-40s. By reestablishing the transgeneric and intermedial linkages, the chapter highlights the public significance of Shanghai modernist writers' seemingly individualistic psychological obsessions with the Modern Girl. The Modern Girl was a chameleon-like enigma over whose definition intense ideological struggles were waged. Some fiction writers foregrounded how the Modern Girl was stereotyped and even maligned by the mass media, while others depicted her as an unhappy heterosexual. If the Modern Girl was a product of both capitalist consumer culture and a modern heteronormative ideology, Chinese literary depictions of the Modern Girl nevertheless showed up the discontents of both capitalist material culture and modern heterosexual liberation.