Modernità, nazionalismo e mascolinità nella Cina del Novecento. La costruzione della mascolinità in Cina e la sua rappresentazione letteraria dalla fine dell'Impero all'epoca delle riforme

The construction of the nation-state in China was a complex social and cultural change that went hand in hand, throughout the 20th century, with the contemporary political and intellectual project of modernity. The protagonists of this process were above all intellectuals, who tried to reconstruct the cultural and social coordinates of male gender identity, translating their research into literary representation. The first part analyses the transition from tradition to modernity through new practices and new knowledge that also deeply conditioned Chinese masculinity in the first half of the twentieth century and the work of authors such as Yu Dafu and Lao She. The second part is dedicated to the reconstruction of the nation and the image of masculinity in Chinese culture and literature in the post-Maoist era: the theme of male subjectivity in this period runs through the works of many authors, and particularly Zhang Xianliang among them.