Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale
Journal issue | 56 | 2020
Research Article | Wreckage, War, Woman. Fragments of a Female Self in Zhang Ailing’s Love In a Fallen City (倾城之恋)
Wreckage, War, Woman. Fragments of a Female Self in Zhang Ailing’s Love In a Fallen City (倾城之恋)
- Alessandra Di Muzio - Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italia - email
Abstract
This article examines wreckage and war as key elements in Zhang Ailing’s novella Qing cheng zhi lian 倾城之恋 (Love in a Fallen City) exploring the strategies used by the female protagonist to engage on a nüxing 女性 ‘feminist’-oriented spatial quest for independence in a male-centered world. Analysed from a feminist perspective, these strategies emerge as potentially empowering and based on the idea of conflict/conquest while dealing with man and romance, but they are also constantly threatened by the instability of history and by the lack of any true agency and gender-specific space for women in the 1940s Chinese society and culture. By analysing the floating/stability dichotomy and the spatial configurations of Shanghai and Hong Kong as described in the novella, the author argues Zhang Ailing’s depiction of Chinese women while dealing with history, society and the quest for self-affirmation is left in-between wreckage and survival, oppression and feminism, revealing her eccentric otherness as a woman and as a writer with respect to socially committed literature.
Submitted: Feb. 6, 2020 | Accepted: May 29, 2020 | Published June 30, 2020 | Language: en
Keywords Feminist spatial quest • Zhang Ailing • Wreckage • Love in a Fallen City • War
Copyright © 2020 Alessandra Di Muzio. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2020/56/017
Articles
- Giorgio Damistra (1650-?), Theodoro Poulakis (1620-1692?) e il Barocco Levantino
- Magdelena Stoyanova
- June 30, 2020
-
Alla Mecca e Oltre
Una selezione di contratti di viaggio registrati presso il tribunale ottomano di Aleppo (secoli XVI-XVIII) - Marco Salati
- June 30, 2020
- Literary Trajectories of Sulaymān al-Ḥalabī, a Hero Who Was Born a Criminal
- Daniela Potenza
- June 30, 2020
- Raccontarsi con le macerie: voce e autorialità in Fihris di Sinan Antoon
- Federico Pozzoli
- June 30, 2020
- Al-mihna wa’l-huwiyya. Motivational Dimensions of Arabic Heritage Learners in a Professionally-Oriented Education Setting
- Marco Aurelio Golfetto
- June 30, 2020
- Whole-Part-Whole Reading Instruction in the Teaching and Learning of Arabic as a Foreign Language at Beginner Level
- Andrea Facchin
- June 30, 2020
- Aishī’s ʿIshrat-nāma: a Dah-nāma with Unexpected Messengers
- Anna Livia Beelaert
- June 30, 2020
- Pakistan-Ukraine. Analogies in the Triangles of Regional Security Complexes
- Yuriy Kotlyar, Marharyta Lymar, Iryna Tykhonenko
- June 30, 2020
- The Epistemological Model of Vedantic Doxography According to the Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha for the Study of Indian Philosophy
- Alberto Pelissero
- June 30, 2020
-
The Architectural Heritage as a Projection of Competition and Negotiation
Shared Muslim-Vīraśaiva Sacred Sites in Northern Karnataka. A Preliminary Approach - Sara Mondini
- June 30, 2020
-
Atypical Compound Verb Constructions in Hindi/Urdu
The Case of Transitive Polar Verbs with Intransitive Vector Verbs - Andrea Drocco, Neha Tiwari
- June 30, 2020
-
MF Husain’s Hindi Autobiography Em. Ef. Husain kī kahānī apnī zubānī
Sketches of a Performative Self, Surfing the World in Space and Time - Alessandra Consolaro
- June 30, 2020
- Sexuality as Translation. Locating the “Queer” in Vietnamese Debates on Sexuality
- Richard Quang-Anh Tran
- June 30, 2020
-
Acquisition of Double-Nominative Constructions by Italian L1 Learners of Chinese
A Cross-Sectional Corpus Study - Anna Morbiato
- June 30, 2020
-
Etymological Elaboration in Chéngyǔ 成语 Teaching
The Role of Opacity, Type of Instruction, and Competence Level - Sergio Conti
- June 30, 2020
- Wreckage, War, Woman. Fragments of a Female Self in Zhang Ailing’s Love In a Fallen City (倾城之恋)
- Alessandra Di Muzio
- June 30, 2020
-
Ah Q Travels to Europe
Christoph Hein’s Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q (1983) and Dario Fo’s La storia di Qu (2011) - Nicoletta Pesaro
- June 30, 2020
-
Troubles on the Border
Marking Japanese Case-Particle Boundaries in Grammatical Annotation - Simone dalla Chiesa
- June 30, 2020
- Izayoi nikki. The History of a Disputed Heritage in the Kamakura Period (1185-1333)
- Carolina Negri
- June 30, 2020
- Fra Contadini di Errico Malatesta, da Firenze a Tokyo
- Filippo Dornetti
- June 30, 2020
- An Analysis of Some Illustrated Books by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) in the Museum of Oriental Art in Venice
- Silvia Vesco
- June 30, 2020
Reviews
- Patrizia Spallini, Ivana Panzeca. Il calamo dell’esistenza
- Angelo Scarabel
- June 30, 2020
- Tie Xiao. Revolutionary Waves. The Crowd in Modern China
- Federico Picerni
- June 30, 2020
| DC Field | Value |
|---|---|
|
dc.identifier |
ECF_article_2977 |
|
dc.title |
Wreckage, War, Woman. Fragments of a Female Self in Zhang Ailing’s Love In a Fallen City (倾城之恋) |
|
dc.contributor.author |
Di Muzio Alessandra |
|
dc.publisher |
Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing, Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari |
|
dc.type |
Research Article |
|
dc.language.iso |
en |
|
dc.identifier.uri |
http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/annali-di-ca-foscari-serie-orientale/2020/56/wreckage-war-woman-fragments-of-a-female-self-in-z/ |
|
dc.description.abstract |
This article examines wreckage and war as key elements in Zhang Ailing’s novella Qing cheng zhi lian 倾城之恋 (Love in a Fallen City) exploring the strategies used by the female protagonist to engage on a nüxing 女性 ‘feminist’-oriented spatial quest for independence in a male-centered world. Analysed from a feminist perspective, these strategies emerge as potentially empowering and based on the idea of conflict/conquest while dealing with man and romance, but they are also constantly threatened by the instability of history and by the lack of any true agency and gender-specific space for women in the 1940s Chinese society and culture. By analysing the floating/stability dichotomy and the spatial configurations of Shanghai and Hong Kong as described in the novella, the author argues Zhang Ailing’s depiction of Chinese women while dealing with history, society and the quest for self-affirmation is left in-between wreckage and survival, oppression and feminism, revealing her eccentric otherness as a woman and as a writer with respect to socially committed literature. |
|
dc.relation.ispartof |
Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale |
|
dc.relation.ispartof |
Vol. 56 | June 2020 |
|
dc.issued |
2020-06-30 |
|
dc.dateAccepted |
2020-05-29 |
|
dc.dateSubmitted |
2020-02-06 |
|
dc.identifier.issn |
|
|
dc.identifier.eissn |
2385-3042 |
|
dc.rights |
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License |
|
dc.rights.uri |
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
|
dc.identifier.doi |
10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2020/56/017 |
|
dc.peer-review |
yes |
|
dc.subject |
Feminist spatial quest |
|
dc.subject |
Feminist spatial quest |
|
dc.subject |
Love in a Fallen City |
|
dc.subject |
Love in a Fallen City |
|
dc.subject |
War |
|
dc.subject |
War |
|
dc.subject |
Wreckage |
|
dc.subject |
Wreckage |
|
dc.subject |
Zhang Ailing |
|
dc.subject |
Zhang Ailing |
| Download data |
-
file_download 261
-
search 587
-
format_quote 0
