Dr. Wang Yiyan

PhD (Usyd), BA (Sichuan, China), MA (Adelaide)
Lecturer
Yiyan.wang@arts.usyd.edu.au

Wang Yiyan holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Sichuan University, China. She taught English for six years at the Southwestern Jiaotong University in Chengdu before she came to Australia. In 1992 she completed a MA by research on the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood at the University of Adelaide. In 1999 she is awarded a PhD from the University of Sydney on the contemporary Chinese writer Jia Pingwa. She was Lecturer in International Studies at UTS before she came to the University of Sydney in 2000.

My major research areas are modern and contemporary Chinese literature, comparative literature, Chinese diaspora studies and critical theory. Specifically she has been working on nationalism, localism and gender representation in contemporary Chinese fiction. She also writes about Chinese artists in Australia.

From Local Stories to National Identity: A Study of Competing National Myths in Chinese Regional Literatures
This ARC Discovery Project investigates the creation, reception and significance of competing national myths in Chinese nativist fiction.

Double Happiness: Multiculturalism and Chinese Artists in Australia
This project investigates Australia’s multiculturalism through examining the cases of Chinese-Australian artists. It examines the degrees of artistic success of migrant artists and to analyse their possibilities of cultural citizenship in Australia society.

Modernism and the City
“Modernism and the City” is a new, joint research project with colleagues in French and Japanese studies. It examines the international and cross-cultural links between modernism and its literary expressions in relation to Paris, Shanghai and Tokyo in the early 20th Century.

Book

• 2005, Wang, Yiyan, Narrating China: the Fictional World of Jia Pingwa, London: Routledge (forthcoming).

Chapters in books

• 2004, 'Jincheng guangshan: Jia Pingwa Shangzhou gushi de bentuxing' (Touring in the city and wandering around the mountains: literary nativism in Jia Pingwa’s stories about his native place Shangzhou), Review Essay for New Classics: Turbulence by Jia Pingwa, Shenyang: Chufeng wenyi, 455-477.
• 2003, 'Shuo jiayuan xiangqing, tan guozu shenfen: shilun Jia Pingwa de xiangtu xiaoshuo' (Local Stories, national identity: a study of Jia Pingwa’s nativist writing’ in Lin Jianfa, ed. Zhongguo dangdai zuojia mianmianguan: xunzhao wenxuede linghun (Many approaches to contemporary Chinese literature), Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi, 2003, 633-42.
• 2003, 'Mr Butterfly in Defunct Capital: "Soft" Masculinity and (Mis)Engendering China', in Kam Louie and Morris Low, eds. Asian Masculinities: the meaning and practice of manhood in China and Japan, London: Routledge, 2003, 41-58.
• 2000, 'Settlers or Sojourners: Multicultural Subjectivity of Chinese-Australian Artists in Sydney', Ien Ang and others eds. Alter Asians, Pluto Press, 107-22.

Articles

• 2004, ‘Nüxing zhuyi yu muquan moshi: shilun Xu Kun “Nüwa” zhong de guozu xushu (From feminism to matriarchy: Xu Kun’s novella “Goddess Nüwa” and national narration), Nanfang wentan (Southern Cultural Forum), Nanning, no. 5, 33-38.
• 2004, ‘The Tyranny of Taste and Cultural Citizenship’, Newsletter, 2004, No. 34, 1, 6-7), International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, the Netherlands.
• 2003, ‘Shuo jiayuan xiangqing, tan guozu shenfen: shilun Jia Pingwa de xiangtu xiaoshuo’ (Local Stories, national identity: a study of Jia Pingwa’s nativist writing’, in Zuojia pinglun (study of authors), Shenyang, no. 2, March 2003, 117-26, (14,000 words).
• 2002, ‘History, Portraiture and Cultural Citizenship’ for Shen Jiawei: Zaijian Revolution 27 September – 19 October 2002, Gallery 4A, Sydney, 6-10.
• 2003, ‘Shen Rong’ and ‘Dai Houying’, in Lee, Lily Xiao Hong, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Twentieth Century, 1912 -1990, eds-in-chief Lily Xiao Hong Lee and A D Stefanowska, University of Hong Kong Libraries Publications series, New York: M E Sharpe.

Book Reviews

• 2005, Song Geng, The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. Reviewed for China Review International, forthcoming.
• 2003, Blum Susan D. and Lionel M. Jensen, China off Center: Mapping the Margins of the Middle Kingdom, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. Reviewed for Oceania, vol. 73: 4 (June 2003), 307-8.
• 2002, Brownell, Susan and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, eds. Chinese Femininities/ Chinese Masculinities: A Reader. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Reviewed in Asian Studies Review, vol. 26, no. 4 (2002).
• 2002, Louie, Kam. Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Reviewed in The Australian, Higher Education Section, Wednesday June 5 2002, p.25.
• 2002, Zhong, Xueping. Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Reviewed in Asian Studies Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (2002).
• 2000, Lodge, David and Kam Louie, Chinese Language and Culture: The Politics of Reading the Dragon, London: Routledge, 1999. Reviewed in The Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, vol. 31 (1999-2000).

My teaching includes senior and postgraduate units of study and modules in Chinese Studies, International and Comparative Literary Studies, Asian Film Studies and Australian Studies as well as a variety of junior and senior units of study in Chinese language acquisition.

I supervise honours, masters and PhD students in modern and contemporary literary studies and cultural studies.

Book editor for the Journal of Oriental Studies.