Di An and Yan Ge: Chinese 80 Hou Women Authors on the Family

Depictions of the family in 20th- and 21st-century Chinese literature have reflected the social and cultural discourses dominant in the country, especially Chinese intellectuals’ changing attitudes to tradition and modernisation. The last decades have seen China’s rise to economic prominence, accompanied by the increased influence of the neoliberal ideology, which has been met with a neoconservative response. A new model of the family has thus emerged. It has been imagined as a shelter from the unsettling realities of life under the conditions of the market economy, a private, consuming community managed by women. This paper focuses on the ways of describing the family in the novels by two well-known women writers of the 80 hou generation (authors born in the 1980s): Di An and Yan Ge. The image of the family in their prose has been compared to the private and neoconservative models and to the depictions of the family in the new historical novel.