Imagining and Contesting Martyrdom

Type Thesis

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Summary

The twentieth-century Chinese experience has been marked and marred by warfare, violent revolution, and death on an unimaginable scale. For many, how to come to terms with the ubiquity of death and how to find meaning in the century’s carnage and bloodshed were among the most excruciating and important questions. While scholars of modern Chinese literature and culture have established the centrality of violence and death in twentieth-century literature, film, and popular culture, little work has rigorously examined one of the more salient responses to the persecution and bloodshed of the modern era: representations of martyrdom—wherein suffering and death are invested with transcendent meaning and fashioned into redemptive and meaningful narratives. My dissertation documents how martyr texts were more than just responses to historical experiences of violence and mass death; they were also vital meaning-making sites wherein notions of selfhood, identity, and community were articulated and contested.