Although stalwart feminist Gloria Steinem has warned us of the limits of a fin de siècle mentality, scholarship on China—and in particular, on Chinese literature—continues in its fascination with this end-of-the-century phenomenon. This scholarly panel is no different; but it hopes to be different in a number of other ways. In an attempt to foster what should be an extremely lively discussion on defining nation, self, and scholarship, Jianmei Liu, Bai Di, and Ann Huss will present a few concrete literary examples of how writers and their audiences have struggled with the concepts of nation, epic, gender, and nationalism. We will look at two "ends of centuries," the late Qing period and the present (1980–1999), at male and female authors, and at fiction from China and Hong Kong. Scholarly trends and views from the diaspora will be touched upon as well.

The chair and discussant of Epic, Gender, Nation, Haili Kong, will take an active part in our presentation, beginning with a brief discussion of the terms epic, gender, and nation and how they may (or may not be) interrelated. Haili will present a limited number of questions to each speaker and the audience. Jianmei, Bai Di, and Ann will prepare a question(s) which fits under the Epic, Gender, Nation rubric, has evolved from the research they are presenting on, and seems most pressing to China/literary scholars at present. All of these questions will be provided to the audience in the form of an issue sheet at the beginning of the panel presentation. The panel hopes, with audience participation, to come to some sort of consensus; even if that consensus is a list of questions, "questions for the millennium," questions on what it means to "be Chinese" in epic, gendered, and national(istic) proportions.

Jianmei Liu, University of Maryland

Before the appearance of East/West cultural clashes during the late Qing era, individual sexual identity was basically determined internally by the moral consciousness of Confucianism and externally by the family and social system. Accompanying crisis and change in nineteenth-century fin de siècle China was the urge to claim a new sexual identity, especially for women. Aided by the inauguration of nationalist discourse at this historical moment, the emancipation of women carried over to meta-narrative ground, where major issues, such as liberation, democracy, and revolution, were articulated: the "woman question" was subordinated to nation building.

In reading some late Qing female feminist writers’ representations, or fiction written in feminine style, I examine how the "unfixing" of gender positions interrupted, reformulated, and recontextualized an unbroken national tradition that usually erased the subject of women’s desire. Wang Miaoru’s Nü yuhua (An Imprisoned Flower) and Shao Zhenhua’s Xayi jiaren (Chivalrous and Fair Ladies) provided a reminder of the difficulties involved in the construction of a feminism that would not systematically speak for all women. These difficulties derived from the writers’ positions and revealed the assumed incongruity between feminist discourse and national narratives. In addition to my discussion of the relationship between gender and nationalism, I believe my account can also reveal the multiple facets of modernity in the Chinese semi-colonial context as Chinese intellectuals anxiously struggled for power.

Bai Di, Iowa State University

Chen Zhongshi, a veteran Chinese writer, published his first novel, Bailu yuan (The White Deer Plain), in 1993. Since then, the novel has attracted an unparalleled amount of attention within the Chinese literary field. Its portraiture of fifty years of vicissitudes in a central Shaanxi village from the turn of the century to the 1950s has been hailed as the first (modern) epic novel of (Han) China. It won the Mao Dun Prize for Literature.

In its obvious effort to reconstruct Chinese nationhood, Bailu yuan has successfully demarcated itself from xungen (or root-searching) literature; the mission of which is to retrieve a Chinese national essence. While xungen works extol an unbridled libido as the existential drive for national survival, Bailu yuan eloquently confirms that Confucian mores and ethics are the very foundation of the Chinese nation. Chen’s novel recognizes, or rather reconceptualizes, Confucian values as innate political forces, the source of the resilient Han nation, and the organizing principles of personal and sexual relationships.

All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Reformation of a nation depends on the reorganization of gender relations. In this presentation, I will attempt to discuss the gender dynamics embedded in building the Chinese man and the Chinese nation. A national epic produced against the backdrop of 1990s global capitalism and surging Chinese nationalism, Bailu yuan redefines Chinese masculinity by combining Confucian self-restraint with sexual drive, by negotiating between politics and sexuality. Indeed, a national epic, even a modern one, is no more than an articulation of masculine desires and concerns.

Eva Shan Chou, City University of New York

In October of 1918, as everyone knows, "The Diary of a Madman" was published in the magazine New Youth, making Lu Xun’s name known to every thinking person in China. The picture painted in the story of "what it means to ‘be Chinese’" was hardly a flattering one, and it was followed by additional unflattering elaborations in other stories. In 1921, "The True Story of Ah Q" began appearing serially, providing an even more devastating view of what it means to be Chinese. Yet this collective self-portrait was quickly embraced by readers; the names of these and other Lu Xun characters immediately passed into the language as a shorthand for the symptoms and traits of being Chinese.

In portraits that showed such unpleasant lineaments, what insights, what features could make them so gripping at the time of publication? We think we know—after all, Lu Xun has been the subject of continuous study and scrutiny for seventy-five years. But actually, what these seventy-five years of commentary obscure is the fact that the first five years, 1918–23, are surprisingly blank. Very few pieces of criticism or reader response can be found from those crucial years. So actually, we cannot say for certain what features in Lu Xun’s stories so fascinated his fellow Chinese in the crucial period when his influential standing was established.

It is in the context of this five-year near-void that the present paper examines the two most extensive of the earliest responses to Lu Xun. Both pieces are entitled "On Reading Nahan" and both were published in October 1923. One is by Mao Dun, the other by an author known only as "Y sheng." Through these theses, one can obtain some sense of the intellectual responses to Lu Xun that might have preceded their appearance.

Ann L. Huss, Wellesley College

The martial arts novels of Hong Kong author Jin Yong often seem to gush with nationalist blood. Yet on closer look, the reader finds the patriotic hero of Tianlong babu reduced to a public laughingstock while Ludingji’s Wei Xiaoboo, a character with little use for "aiguo" or patriotism, stymies the plans of his nationalist hero cohorts. Perhaps then Jin Yong’s novels say more about the hopes and plans of a postcolonial Hong Kong than they do about a fervent (however allusive) Chinese nationalism. Yet the question remains: Whereto "the nation"? What about all those websites and films, Jin’s undeniably impressive publishing history, and the scholars who traveled halfway around the world to Colorado in 1998 to meet Jin Yong and revel in talk of "national consensus"—an experience which might have seemed to an "outsider" little more than a glorified bonding session?