This thesis is an in-depth analysis of three later short stories "Lust and Restrictions" (Characters Omitted),"Flowers and Pistils Floating on the Waves" (Characters Omitted), and "Happy Reunion" (Characters Omitted), written by the 1921 Shanghai born Chinese author Zhang Ailing. The analysis takes a look at the structure of these short stories and discovers that they differ from her earlier short stories, that is those she wrote ten years earlier in the 1940s, in their structural and narrative approach and thereby place a greater demand upon the reader's participation. These three stories are the only short stories by Zhang Ailing that do not develop in a linear fashion. The author introduces them in the preface of the anthology Sense of Loss by calling the second story "Flowers and Pistils Floating on the Waves" an "experiment." Because of their similar structural and narrative approach, I called all three of them "experimental" which really means the same as "modernists", to distinguish them from her earlier linear stories. The three major characteristics of the experimental stories, that is—the narrative happening in the character's minds, the chronological distortion of the narrative and the almost invisibility of a narrator large subordinated to the character's presence—all have the effect of bringing the reader close to the characters' subjective thoughts and reflect the characters' state of mind in the stories' present time, depending on the frequency of the switches between the times, that is between the past happening in the characters' minds and the stories present time. The reader's participation in these three stories is largely due to the narrative structure while in some of Zhang Ailing's lienar stories, as examined in this paper, it is based on the stories' content. The political changes in China, and the author's move away from the mainland could account for her increasingly pessimistic outlook on life reflected in the disjointed structures of the "experimental" stories. / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate

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Thesis (M.A.)--McGill University (Canada), 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Comparative Literature." Includes bibliographical references (p. 224-231).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong Baptist University, 2003. / Thesis submitted to the Dept. of Chinese Language and Literature. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-232).

It seems unwise to compare Eileen Chang and Alice Munro, because at first glance the urban traits of Chang's Shanghai and Hong Kong romances are dissimilar to the rural idiosyncrasies of Munro's southwestern Ontario stories. However, both the female writers describe in their fiction the women characters' romantic fantasies and their interrelationships with reality. In Chang's Romances, in the westernized and commercialized cosmopolitan set, a new age is coming, and the traditional patriarchal familial and moral systems are disintegrating. The women try to escape from frustrating circumstances through the rescue of romantic love and marriage. In Munro's fiction, the women attempt to get ride of their banal small-town cultures in order to search for freedom of imagination and expression through the medium of art, although at ; the center of their quest for selfhood is always their love and hate relationship with men. The women are in the dilemma of "female financial reality" and romantic love; they express their desires and fears through immoral and abnormal love relationships and vicarious escapades in their imagination; their interpretation of life and love is in reference to art in general, but such interpretation is full of disguise. Only in their unbound daydreams and imagination can they express their desires freely. Alice Munro and Eileen Chang's fictional worlds bespeak a sense of femininity. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis examines the theme of gender and power relationships in the works of Ding Ling (1904-1986) and Zhang Ailing (1920-1995), focusing particularly on two novels: Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (1948) and Zhang Ailing’s The Rice-Sprout Song (1954). Through this examination, this thesis demonstrates the critiques by these authors of the CCP and its policies which, while ostensibly guaranteeing equality to women, in actuality do nothing more than reinscribe traditional Confucian gender values. This thesis situates these novels historically, and places them into the context of the author’s other writings. The analysis focuses on three main aspects of these two novels: violence, repression of women’s desire, and female sexuality. Through a close reading informed by a feminist approach to gender relationships, this thesis demonstrates the startling similarities in the critiques of Ding Ling and Zhang Ailing, despite the writers’ different political ideologies and situations in regard to the CCP.