Fashioning Chinese History and Culture --A Comparison Analysis of Eileen Chang’s “Chinese Life and Fashions” and “Geng Yi Ji” 1943

DOI

10.2991/sschd-18.2019.41How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Culture, History, Eileen Chang, Chinese Life and Fashions.

Abstract

This paper focuses on two articles by the Shanghai-born writer Eileen Chang. Written in January and December 1943 respectively, “Chinese Life and Fashions” was created for the English language, Shanghai-based magazine The XXth Century, “Geng Yi Ji” was produced for the Chinese Magazine Gu Jin (Past and resent). Both the English and Chinese articles outlined the history of traditional Chinese fashion, and the English article “Chinese Life and Fashions” contained hand-drawn illustrations by Chang. Both articles were for some time thought by academics to contain largely the same content and were considered as a single unit. Further evaluation of the content has demonstrated that these articles are far more complex and nuanced and therefore are considerably different in character; rather than providing a straightforward historical narrative “Geng Yi Ji” aims to demonstrate the evolution of Chinese fashions and then uses this to argue for the abandonment of traditional fashions. It provides a comparison in order to demonstrate how Chang’s writing on fashion for two popular magazines gave her an ideal opportunity to set out her argument for two entirely separate audiences in this paper. It also highlights how the two articles have continued to affect popular approaches (in China and in the West) to traditional Chinese fashion.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Lan-Lan YAN
AU  - Jing SONG
PY  - 2019/01
DA  - 2019/01
TI  - Fashioning Chinese History and Culture --A Comparison Analysis of Eileen Chang’s “Chinese Life and Fashions” and “Geng Yi Ji” 1943
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th Annual International Conference on Social Science and Contemporary Humanity Development (SSCHD 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 237
EP  - 242
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/sschd-18.2019.41
DO  - 10.2991/sschd-18.2019.41
ID  - YAN2019/01
ER  -