Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s?1930s

A telling analysis of the formation and evolution of modern Chinese intellectual masculinities.

After its doors were forced open by the Opium Wars in the late Qing dynasty, China faced a crisis of masculinity that converged with its national crisis. The power of physical aggression increasingly overshadowed literary attainments and became a new imperative of male honor in early Republican China. Afflicted with anxiety about their increasingly effeminate image as perceived by Western colonial powers, Chinese intellectuals strategically distanced themselves from the old literati and reassessed their positions vis-à-vis violence. In Mastery of Words and Swords, Jun Lei explores the formation and evolution of modern Chinese intellectual masculinities as constituted in racial, gender, and class discourses mediated by the West and Japan. To fully reveal the evolving masculine models of a “scholar-warrior,” this book employs an innovative methodology that combines theoretical rigor, archival research, and analysis of literary texts and visual objects. Situating the changing gender relations in modern Chinese history and culture, the book engages critically with male subjectivity concerning other pivotal issues such as semi-coloniality, psychoanalysis, modern love, feminism, and urbanization.

Jun Lei is assistant professor of Chinese in the department of international studies at Texas A&M University. She is the coauthor of First Step: An Elementary Reader for Modern Chinese and First Step: Workbook for Modern Chinese.