Self-absorption and performance in Tanci fiction: Eighteenth-century Chinese conceptions of identity in comparative perspective

This article provides an analysis of Zaishengyuan, an eighteenth-century romance authored by Chen Duansheng, who exemplifies the ways in which early modern Chinese women entered the field of prose fiction. Alienated from the vernacular novel, literary women in eighteenth-century China were channelled into tanci, a genre of narrative fiction connected to romances and manuscript culture. 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. It illuminates a social ecology of fiction writing that both differs from and resonates with that in eighteenth-century Europe.