ERIC Number: EJ1276406
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2020-Dec
Pages: 18
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0045-6713
EISSN: N/A
Disappearing Fairies and Ghosts: Female and Child Characters as Others in Chinese Contemporary Children's Fantasy
Children's Literature in Education, v51 n4 p433-450 Dec 2020
Situated within the changing economic and political contexts of China's modernization and globalization, children's fantasy novels prove to be apt vehicles for exploring the plights and challenges that women and girls face in the new millennium in China. This article provides a feminist critique of two contemporary Chinese children's fantasy novels, "My Mother is a Fairy" by Chen Danyan and "Jiujiu From the Ghost Mansion" by Tangtang, and examines the marginalization and silencing of the otherworld female/child characters in these narratives. It focuses on how they rework old literary tropes and conventions, employing female children as focalizers. These novels are found to construct a binary opposition between the fantastic-female-child and the rational-male-adult, with the latter dominating the female and the child by repressing their propensity for imagination and fantasy. However, although these fantasy novels might seem to conform to the ideological status quo in terms of the patriarchal family structure, they also have a subversive edge in the way that the binary opposition between male and female is transgressed. Such novels point to the formation of a new kind of intersubjective relationship that is based on understanding and tolerance rather than refusal and dominance.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Childrens Literature, Fantasy, Novels, Feminism, Gender Bias, Females, Literary Devices, Imagination, Ideology, Family Structure
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: China
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A