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  • Chinese Literature and the Child: Children and Childhood in Late Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction by Kate Foster
  • Xu Xu (bio)
Kate Foster. Chinese Literature and the Child: Children and Childhood in Late Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Kate Foster’s Chinese Literature and the Child is a notable addition to the scant literature in English on literary representations of Chinese childhood. Foster examines the child image in Chinese fiction published in the 1980s and 1990s, arguing that the child plays a significant role in defining adult identity, no matter whether it is in the form of an individual, a social group, or the nation. Foster’s argument strongly evokes Jacqueline Rose’s controversial but foundational text in children’s literature criticism The Case of Peter Pan, which focuses on the innocent child as the fantasied and constitutional Other of the adult. Unlike Rose, however, Foster sees the child as corrupt and ambiguous, a symbol of adult anxiety and despair over China’s social conditions. Foster’s child is thus situated in the historical context of twentieth century China, characterized by repeated attempts to critique the past and define the future in order to forge a modern new nation.

The book’s strength lies in its emphasis on the connections between the past and the present as manifest in the figure of the corrupt child. Siding with critics who argue against the myth of Chinese history’s continuous revolutionary breaks with its past, Chinese Literature and the Child locates the origin of the late twentieth-century Chinese child in the May Fourth intellectuals’ early twentieth-century investment in the image of the child; Foster sees this 1910s child figure as foundational to the nationalist discourse of modern China. While the dominant child image of the early twentieth century was the innocent child symbolizing China’s new and hopeful future, Foster suggests, this innocence also was challenged by Lu Xun, arguably the foremost modern Chinese writer. Building on Andrew Jones’ reading of Lu Xun’s works, in which children cannot represent a clean break with the degenerate past because it is inscribed upon them in biological and social reproduction, Foster argues that the corrupted child is further and more fully explored in late twentieth-century Chinese fiction. Foster thus opens with an historical overview of discourses on childhood in both China and the West, both to establish links between the present and past China and to compare Western critical theories on the child with Chinese fictional representations of the child.

Later in the book, Foster develops the idea of the corrupt child in greater detail. Her chapters focus on variations of the corrupt child: “the arrested infant,” “the tainted progeny,” “the abandoned child,” and “the storyteller.” Foster reads the image of the arrested infant—imagined, destroyed, or malformed—as a signifier for the impotence and failure of the male father as well as Chinese society. She also examines “tainted progeny” in narratives featuring silent and malevolent children, strange and threatening foundlings, and illegitimate children as a destructive force. According to Foster, [End Page 404] late twentieth-century Chinese writers’ depictions of “bad seeds” not only evidence the product of evil parentage and damaged society, but mine the tension between heredity and pedagogy, nature and nurture; such issues give rise to Lu Xun’s child characters. The image of the unheroic orphan, too, speaks of both a flawed social system and need for an ideal father figure. While Foster argues that these troubled child images are simply an empty and mute signifier for adult anxiety, guilt, fear, and fragility, she concludes with a look at works that employ child narrators and present some degree of child consciousness either remembered or voiced. Foster suggests that even these child narrators are still the object of the texts’ focalization, employed to voice adults’ judgments on their flawed childhood selves as a result of the ills of Chinese society.

The Chinese novels of the 1980s and 1990s examined in the book thus collectively paint a bleak and pessimistic picture of China’s future, which counters the optimism and hope embodied in the innocent child of the early twentieth century. Foster’s discussion...

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