The thesis primarily engages with Proust and China from the following three aspects: the Chinese translations and retranslations of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, contemporary mainland Chinese writers’ intertextual engagement with Proust, and the transcultural dialogue between Proust and the Franco-Chinese author, François Cheng. Part I Chapter I compares and contrasts different – integral and selective – Chinese translations of La Recherche, and explores their different emphases as well as negligence of Proustian themes, e.g. time and memory over anti-Semitism and homosexuality, due to the former’s strong resonance with Chinese philosophical and aesthetic traditions. The chapter is further substantiated by a close examination of various strategies employed to translate passages on sadomasochism and homosexuality in Proust’s work, which reflect changing discourses on and attitudes to the subjects in China. Chapter II focuses on the creative reception of Proust’s work in China. It explores how three mainland Chinese writers’ intertextual engagement with Proust is influenced by the first integral translation of La Recherche, and how they cite Proust partly to enhance the cultural prestige of their own works, while creating a horizon of expectations and a favourable climate of reception of Proust’s work in China. With a shift of focus to the Chinese diaspora in France, Part II explores Cheng’s French-language novel Le Dit de Tianyi as the author’s intellectual and artistic dialogue with Proust’s work. In addition to the intertextual relations, this part particularly examines Cheng’s conceptual and structural engagement with Proust’s novelistic conceptions of Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman, his approach to the fine arts, and finally his use of mythological motifs. Through the case of Proust, the thesis tries to gain a better understanding of the interaction between literatures and cultures, and particularly, the phenomena of cultural appropriation and dialogue in literature. More specifically, it demonstrates how the cultural heritages of China and the West can be re-negotiated, re-thought, and put into dialogue through the fictional and creative medium of literature.

During the period of economic expansion and openness to personal expression and individuality following Deng Xiaoping's reforms, the Chinese avant-garde women writers engaged in a project of resistance to the traditionally appropriated use of the female body, image, and voice. This resistance can be seen in the ways they consciously construct a private space in their fiction. In this dissertation, I argue that this space is created by presenting alternative forms of female sexuality, in contrast to the heterosexual wife and mother, and by adding details of their own personal histories in their writing. Key to this argument is the Chinese concept of si (privacy) and how the female avant-garde writers turn its traditionally negative associations into a positive tool for writing the self. While male appropriations of images of the female body for political or state-authored purposes are not new to the contemporary period or even the twentieth century, the female avant-garde writers are particularly conscious of the ways in which their bodies are not their own. Moreover, contemporary criticism that labels the works of the female avant-garde writers as self-exposing, titillating, and trite overlooks the difference between authorial intent and commercial or political appropriation, which has led to a profound misunderstanding of these works. In addition, it has also led to a conflation of the female avant-garde writers' works with those of the later body writers. Therefore the purpose of this dissertation is to provide a closer look at the concept of si-privacy and how it intersects with various forms of self-writing, as well as how it is used as a narrative strategy by three contemporary female authors, Xu Kun, Lin Bai, and Hai Nan. Specifically, I consider the similarities and differences in the ways that these authors create and orient themselves in both their memoirs and their self-referential fiction.