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Can I read Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists : Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction on EtoBox?

Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists : Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction by Keith McMahon is a book available to read on EtoBox.

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<p>Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, <i>Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists</i> examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China.<br> In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as well-known as <i>Dream of the Red Chamber,</i> Keith McMahon identifies a sexual economy defined by the figures of the "miser" and the "shrew"—caricatures of the retentive, self-containing man and the overflowing, male-enervating woman. Among these and other characters, the author explores the issues surrounding the practice of polygamy, the logic of its overvaluation of masculinity, and the nature of sexuality generally in Chinese society. How does the man with many wives manage and justify his sexual authority? Why and how might he escape or limit this presumed authority, sometimes to the point of portraying himself as abject

Author
Keith McMahon
Publisher
Duke University Press; Duke University Press Books
Published
1995
Language
EN
ISBN
9780822397298
Subjects
Psychology, Gender Studies, Literary Criticism

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