Jiang, Yishan; (2025) Rethinking Chinese Modernity: A Comparative Literary Study of Chinese Kinship as Cultural Discourse (1900–1949). Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Kinship is typically discussed in the anthropological and biological domains in terms of various definitions that rely on direct or indirect connections to reproduction and genes or blood-based relationships. However, this comparative literature dissertation, Rethinking Modernity: A Comparative Literary Study of Chinese Kinship as Cultural Discourse (1900–1949), focuses on demonstrating the transformation of Chinese kinship as a cultural discourse that helped to shape the emergence of Chinese modernity during the period from 1900 to 1949. This study, therefore, goes beyond those previous studies that have exclusively emphasised the role played by two parameters – individualism and nationalism – in their assessment of modernity. By drawing upon twentieth-century Chinese and American novels; historical materials, including influential magazines and newspapers; gender and post-colonial theories, and translation studies, this thesis concentrates on three types of kinships within the Chinese framework of wulun 五伦 (the five basic human relationships): The sibling relationship, the husband-wife relationship and the father-son relationship. This thesis begins by exploring two essential questions – Why kinship? and why modernity? – in the first chapter, and it then proceeds to an analysis of three test-cases of the articulation of kinship: “bloodless” sisters versus blood brothers in Lin Yutang’s Moment In Peking and Pearl S. Buck’s The House of Earth; bloodless kinship in the Chinese Nora’s daughter and husband-wife kinship in Su Qing’s Ten Years of Marriage and its sequel, along with Pearl S. Buck’s East Wind: West Wind; and male blood kinship through father-son relationships in Lao She’s Er Ma and its two English translations, Mr Ma and Son and The Two Mas. This thesis takes a different tack from those studies focusing exclusively on individualism and nationalism as the parameters used to understand modernity. This thesis argues that the Chinese jia 家 (family) – a key component of the word guojia 国家 (state family) – served as a central space for intellectuals and writers to envision twentieth-century China and its path to modernity.

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