Self-Absorption and Performance in Tanci Fiction: 18th-Century Chinese Conceptions of Identity in Comparative Perspective

The chapter provides a detailed analysis of an 18th-century romance authored by a Chinese woman. Zaishengyuan 再生緣 (The Destiny of Rebirth), the best-conceived example of tanci 彈詞 fiction, helps us understand how women of 17th- and 18th-century China entered the production of narrative fiction. Alienated from the vernacular novel, literary women in early modern China were channeled into tanci, a genre of narrative fiction connected to romances, story-singing performances, and manuscript culture. Yet tanci fiction is far from being a regressive genre. With exuberant representations of female cross-dressing and many other forms of self-transformation, Zaishengyuan experiments with radical conceptions of individual identity as discontinuous and self-determined. Throughout its analysis of Zaishengyuan’s imaginings of selfhood, the chapter relates the work to prevailing notions of identity and the print public sphere in 17th- and 18th-century England (and other parts of Europe) and to theories of self-absorption and performance. Overall, the chapter argues that female authors in 18th-century China imagined selfhood and claimed authorship in distinct ways, illuminating a social ecology of fiction writing and circulation that diverges from 18th-century Europe, though the two contexts remain comparable.