A Journey into the City

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_1703
dc.title	A Journey into the City. Migrant Workers’ Relation with the Urban Space and Struggle for Existence in Xu Zechen’s Early jingpiao Fiction
dc.contributor.author	Picerni Federico
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/annali-di-ca-foscari-serie-orientale/2019/1/a-journey-into-the-city/
dc.description.abstract	In contemporary China, rural-urban migrants constitute a new urban subject with entirely new identity-related issues. This study aims at demonstrating how literature can be a valid field in investigating such evolving subjectivities, through an analysis of Xu Zechen’s early novellas depicting migrants’ vicissitudes in Beijing. Combining a close reading of the texts and a review of the main social problems characterising rural-urban migration in China, this paper focuses on the representation of the identity crisis within the migrant self in Xu’s stories, taking into account the network of meanings employed by the writer to signify the objective and subjective tension between the city and the countryside.
dc.relation.ispartof	Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 55 \| June 2019
dc.issued	2019-06-27
dc.dateAccepted	2019-03-20
dc.dateSubmitted	2019-02-13
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2385-3042
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2019/01/014
dc.peer-review	yes
dc.subject	Chinese rural-urban migrants
dc.subject	Chinese rural-urban migrants
dc.subject	Contemporary Chinese literature
dc.subject	Contemporary Chinese literature
dc.subject	Identity
dc.subject	Identity
dc.subject	Urban literature
dc.subject	Urban literature
dc.subject	Xu Zechen
dc.subject	Xu Zechen

Research Article
open access peer reviewed

Migrant Workers’ Relation with the Urban Space and Struggle for Existence in Xu Zechen’s Early jingpiao Fiction

Federico Picerni Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italia; Universität Heidelberg, Deutschland

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abstract

In contemporary China, rural-urban migrants constitute a new urban subject with entirely new identity-related issues. This study aims at demonstrating how literature can be a valid field in investigating such evolving subjectivities, through an analysis of Xu Zechen’s early novellas depicting migrants’ vicissitudes in Beijing. Combining a close reading of the texts and a review of the main social problems characterising rural-urban migration in China, this paper focuses on the representation of the identity crisis within the migrant self in Xu’s stories, taking into account the network of meanings employed by the writer to signify the objective and subjective tension between the city and the countryside.

Published

June 27, 2019

Accepted

March 20, 2019

Submitted

Feb. 13, 2019

Language

Keywords: Identity • Urban literature • Contemporary Chinese literature • Chinese rural-urban migrants • Xu Zechen

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2019/01/014

Copyright: © 2019 Federico Picerni. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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