Abstract: The Song of Youth, a story of a young woman's awakening to her sexuality, political identity, and social agency in prerevolutionary China, became one of the most beloved novels from the Maoist period. Female author Yang Mo wrote the book for educated readers; feminist film critic Dai Jinhua describes the journey of a young student from individualism to revolutionary activism as "a handbook for the thought reform of the intellectuals."1 Chapters 7 through 14 narrate the experiences of the main character, Lin Daojing, as she joins peasants in the countryside to revolt against a local landlord. These chapters were not present in the original 1958 novel; along with three chapters dealing with the organization of a strike in the end, they were added in 1960 in response to criticism of the petty-bourgeois nature of the book and particularly its main character. With these revisions, Yang Mo was able to satisfy the majority of her critics, convincing them that the representation of the main character's journey contained sufficient evidence of her interactions with members of the peasant and working classes, the portion of the citizenry that held the privileged position of "the people" in Maoist China.2 Critics writing today often dismiss these chapters, insisting they show the interference of a heavy-handed propaganda machine and disrupt the otherwise straightforward narrative of an individual's maturity.3 KeywordsSocialist RealismChinese Communist PartyCultural RevolutionLiterary FormIdeological LanguageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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