Abstract: This paper examines how recent writings from outside China that reimagine the life of the Chinese author Ling Shuhua (1900-90) have been shaped by transnationalist and feminist agendas of contrasting kinds, depending on their differing contexts of production and other factors. It analyses how transnationalism and feminism have overtly served as key conceptual grounding for the production of two of these works, namely Patricia Laurence’s Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes (2003) and Sasha Su-Ling Welland’s A Thousand Miles of Dreams (2006). It also links these texts’ ideological positions with their narrative forms, examining how postmodernist literary strategies such as the merging of biography, autobiography, metabiography and criticism, correspond to anti-normative, anti-essentialist and anti-hierarchical assumptions within the versions of transnationalism and feminism to be found in these works. Both of these two books are by academic authors, and are explicitly informed by theoretical discourses. By contrast, the paper also considers the case of Hong Ying’s commercial romantic novel K: The Art of Love (1999), arguing that, while notorious for presenting a gratuitously sexualized image of Ling Shuhua (disguised as a fictional character named ‘Lin’), the novel is also interested in feminism and transnationalism, albeit in markedly different ways to the other two books.

Key words: Life writing, transnationalism, feminism, postmodernism,Ling Shuhua

Dr Ralph Parfect is Acting Director at the Lau China Institute, King’s College London. His PhD is in English Literature, from King’s College London, and he has published on nineteenth and twentieth-century English fiction. His current research interests relate to cultural production and consumption in contemporary China and to the British reception of Chinese culture. He has a book chapter forthcoming on the internet reception of contemporary Chinese cinema, and is currently working on a paper looking at British modernists’ reception of Chinese art in the early 1900s.