Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Texas at Austin, 2010.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Copyright page -- Acknowledgment -- Figures -- Introduction -- Negotiating with the Nightmarish Modern -- Introduction -- Aborted Dreams of “New Women”: Xiao Hong and Mei Niang -- Matrimonial Syndrome in a Besieged Society: Identity Complex in Eileen Chang’s “Boudoir Stories” -- Rethinking the Disintegrated Modern -- Introduction -- Alienated Minds Dreaming for Integration: Constrained Cosmopolitanism in Wumingshi’s and Xu Xu’s “Modern Literati Novel” -- “Subjectivity” and Class Consciousness: Intellectual’s Predicament and Lu Ling’s “Neo-Leftist Stories” -- Contending for a “New Democratic Modern” -- Introduction -- “Problem Stories” as Part of the “National Form”: Rural Society in Transition and Zhao Shuli’s “Peasant Stories” -- From Feminist to Party’s Intellectual? Identity (Trans-)formation and Ding Ling’s “New Woman Stories” -- Conclusion -- Back Matter -- References -- Index.

In Contending for the \'Chinese Modern\' , Xiaoping Wang studies the writing of fiction in 1940s China. Through a practice of political hermeneutics of fictional texts and social subtexts, it explores how social modernity and literary modernity intertwined with and interacted upon each other in the development of modern Chinese literature. It not only makes critical reappraisement of some renowned modern Chinese writers, but also sheds fresh lights on a series of theoretical problems pertaining to the issue of plural modernities, in which the problematic of subjectivity, class consciousness and identity politics are the key words as well as the concrete procedures that it employs to undertake the ideological analysis. The manuscript signifies a new paradigm in studies of modern Chinese literature.