Women, Literature and Art in Republican China

A Special Issue in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 57, nos. 1-8 [TBD], 2028

Abstracts Due: April 1, 2026

Manuscripts Due: October 30, 2026

Special Issue Editor(s): Lang Wang and Ying Xiong

Submissions Portal: par e-mail

The Republican period is an important era marked by profound social transformation, national crises, and intellectual awakening. Scholarly work on the literature/art of this period has long fixated on the canonical discourses and paradigms established by prominent male intellectuals. Yet during these same decades, a significant number of women, writers, playwrights, painters, critics, journalists, editors, scholars, translators, poets, were not only producing creative work but also developing distinctive albeit often overlooked theoretical and critical perspectives on literature/art. They are actively shaping modernity and history.

Women intellectuals generated insightful ideas on literature and art that are still relevant to the literary/artistic production today. For instance, Feng Yuanjun (1900-1974), female writer famous for her stories about progressive New Women defying conventional constraints, protested dismissive attitudes toward literary works that express deep grief for the function of literature and art that lies precisely in communicating the hidden pains and joys. Feng also endorses what Mao Dun would label, in a negative light, as emotionalism and asserts the importance of “private writing” which is oftentimes considered as “feminine writing.” Likewise, Lü Bicheng (1883-1943), a female writer and poet, lamented over the lack of appropriate means for Chinese New Women to grieve over China’s misery as a modernizing nation state and the warped femininity of her time that quelled her gendered creativity. For Lü, Chinese femininity constructed by the Nan She new intellectual male elites is nothing more than a way to interiorize the self-effacement of a woman’s gender awareness and individuality, given that only the aspect of Western Romanticism that objectified women thus reboosting waning gender stereotypes was assimilated, which was biased against talented women in favor of the virtuous.

This special issue seeks to shift scholarly attention to the intellectual and theoretical contribution of women in Republican China to the history of ideas on literature and art. We are interested in women’s distinctive aesthetic principles, critical methodologies, cultural stances, theoretical interventions, self-representational rhetoric, and poetic imagination in areas which are still considered as the province of men. These ideas are often embedded in diaries, letters, critical essays, commentaries, prefaces, speeches and are exhibited in their artist and literary works.

We are interested in innovative research committed to the rediscovery of literary/artistic ideas of women intellectuals in Republican China. In particular, we welcome essays that put women’s ideas about literature/art into conversation with their creative practices. Research might focus on a single female intellectual, or a group of female intellectuals engaged in cultural productions in the Republican era. We are also curious how women’s ideas emerged as a counter-discourse vis-à-vis the nationalist-masculinist discourse surrounding literature/art in the era. That is, we would be particularly interested in how women intellectuals subverted the literary/artistic paradigms and institutions through discursive production. How did they grapple with the stigmatization of women’s literature and art? How did they claim a room of their own in the deeply hierarchical and patriarchal institution that is literature and art? While we welcome studies on famous female intellectuals, we also keenly seek investigations that restore historically forgotten women’s contribution to the history of Chinese literature/art.

Submission Instructions

Interested contributors are highly encouraged to send an abstract of 250 words to Lang Wang (wang2863@alumni.purdue.edu) and Ying Xiong (yxiong@shnu.edu.cn) by April 1st, 2026. Notifications of acceptance would be communicated by April 15, 2026. Full-length essays in MLA style (7,000-9,000 words, inclusive of works cited) are due by October 1st, 2026.

Should you have questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to us. Thank you. 

For more information, please visit the journal's official website: 

https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/women-literature-and-a...