Abstract
Abstract Lu Yin (1899–1935), a modern Chinese writer, employed a variety of vernacular genres to explore women's living conditions at the turn of the twentieth century. With her vision of nüquanzhuyi (feminism) and her conceptualization of writing, Lu Yin modeled herself as a feminist rhetorician and employed redefinition and diary/epistolary fiction as major rhetorical strategies to challenge the sexist assumptions in the prevailing patriarchal discourses and to empower Chinese women. This study further calls for a more flexible and sensitive approach to studying women's rhetorics from different cultures. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Mary Garrett and Xing (Lucy) Lu for their constructive feedback. I am also grateful to CSU–Fresno for its support of this project with a Grant for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities. 2On May 4, 1919, students in Beijing demonstrated against the Chinese government's humiliating policy toward Japan. There resulted a series of strikes and associated events amounting to a social and intellectual revolution. These events were soon dubbed by the students the May Fourth Movement, which acquired a broader meaning in later years. 3See Chinese Department at Jinan University, Zhongguo lidai shige mingpian shangxi. 180–83. 4Unless noted otherwise the passages quoted from the original texts are my translation. 5Lu Yin was well versed in classical Chinese; her view of writing was inevitably influenced by the ancient Chinese philosophers in terms of cosmology and epistemology. This sense of a unity with the whole of society and of the world comes from the Neo-Confucian tradition—the great learning paradigm grounded in the cosmological assumption of a unity of heaven and man—which claims that the outer world may be ordered by first cultivating the inherent goodness within the individual mind. 6Since the late Qing period, Chinese intellectuals and writers had engaged in the Baihua (Vernacular) Movement in which they translated various kinds of Western philosophical and literary works, experimented with new words, sentence structures, vernacular genres, and other baihua rhetorical devices to create a new culture. See Edward Gunn's Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose. 7Lu Xun's short fiction "Diary of a Mad Man" was published in New Youth in May 1918. Ding Ling published "Diary of Miss Sophia" in Fiction Monthly in 1928.