Abstract
Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) held that even the youngest child already carried “the perennial contents of the human soul.”2 For many critics, both Western and Chinese, the literary baby cannot be delivered into any narrative unmarked by its origins. Indeed, the child in literature has been argued to be a fluid and changing enigma which is essentially culture-bound.3 The child is not, however, merely a product of its heritage; it also represents the future. It is a figure of potential which, according to Confucius (traditional dates 551–479 B.C.), offers the possibility that tomorrow will “surpass” today and, as such, is worthy of adult respect. Positioned between past and future, between the adult that was and the adult to come, the child is a potent representative of dissatisfaction with the past and present, and the promise and desire — or lack of hope — for change.
The young are to be held in awe. How do we know that what is to come will not surpass the present?1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Confucius, The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors/a new translation and commentary by E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, trans. E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 55.
Carl Gustav Jung, The Development of Personality, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1991), 45.
Ellen Pifer defines childhood as a “cultural construction.” Ellen Pifer, Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 1.
Andrew F. Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff, eds, Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 6.
Anne Behnke Kinney, ed., Chinese Views of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), 1.
One interesting gender-based difference comes from Confucian ritual texts. According to The Book of Rites (Liji), phases of development were different for girls and boys, with girls taking the steps which would prepare them for marriage at the age of fourteen, and boys as late as twenty, or even thirty. Ping-chen Hsiung, A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 184.
Yu Hua “Shi ba sui chu men yuanxing” (On the Road at Eighteen), in Yu Hua zuopin ji, by Yu Hua (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1995), 3–10.
Wang Shuo “Dongwu xiongmeng” (Animal Ferocity), in Dongwu xiongmeng:’ shouhuo’ 50 nian jingxuan xilie 7, ed. Li Xiaolin, Xiao Yuanmin, and Cheng Yongxin (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe, 2009), 1–70.
Dong Xi Erguang xiangliang (A Resounding Slap in the Face) (Changchun: Changchun chubanshe, 1998).
See, for example: Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu, “Postmodernity, Popular Culture and the Intellectual: A Report on Post-Tiananmen China,” Boundary 2, 23.2 (Summer 1996): 139–169
Xudong Zhang, “Nationalism, Mass Culture and Intellectual Strategies in Post-Tiananmen China,” Social Text 55 (Summer 1998): 109–140
Ben Xu, “Postmodern-Postcolonial Criticism and Pro-Democracy Enlightenment,” Modern China 27.1 (January 2001): 117–147.
An impressive study of the child in short fiction published in Chinese magazines and literary journals in the 1980s and 1990s by He Weiqing lists over 330 works. Even so, it excludes many novels, short stories published only in anthologies, and works by writers living outside China. He Weiqing Xiaoshuo ertong: 1980–2000 Zhongguo xiaoshuo de ertong shiye 1980–2000 (Children in fiction: the child viewpoint in Chinese fiction from 1980 to 2000) (Qingdao: Zhongguo haiyang daxue chubanshe, 2005).
Jon L. Saari, for example, argues: “The very emphasis upon the centrality of childhood as a basis for adult life may in fact be a Western bias.” Jon L. Saari, Legacies of Childhood: Growing up Chinese in a Time of Crisis 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1990), 1.
Copyright information
© 2013 Kate Foster
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Foster, K. (2013). Introduction. In: Chinese Literature and the Child. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137310989_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137310989_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45680-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31098-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)