Welcome to Writing Lives in China

Marjorie Dryburgh, Sarah Dauncey

China has a long and rich tradition of life writing that is still imperfectly understood. Generations of China scholars have used biographical and autobiographical works to supplement or correct the orthodox historical record, to gain insights into shifting representations of ideas or practices, generic conventions, and identity formation, yet relatively little is written on how these genres worked.

Where life narratives are discussed, they are treated primarily within the context of historiographical or literary production, and not as works with a distinct project of self-narration. There is a wealth of personal writing, in diaries, poetry, letters, necrologies, essays and other genres, that contains reflection of personal experience, identity and the life course: a narrow focus on works marked explicitly as biographical and autobiographical excludes many of the ways in which Chinese lives were written.

The aim of this project is to facliitate research and communication on the wider area of life writing in China. The project builds on an international workshop Writing Lives in China: self, subject and society, held in March 2008 at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield (UK). The workshop was generously supported by the British Academy, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and the White Rose East Asia Centre.

Workshop participants came from universities in Europe, East Asia, and north America. Papers explored seventeenth century dream records and obituaries, 'autobiographical moments' in religious meditation, occasional painting and in fiction, modern political diaries and autobiographies, and personal websites and blogs of novelists and disability activists, and drew on theoretical frameworks from brain science to narrative theory.

From these very diverse enquiries, we identified a number of shared concerns:

The 'Resources' section of this site is currently under development - follow the link above right for recent additions.