Dr Yiyan Wang

BA Sichuan MA Adelaide PhD USYD
Senior Lecturer
Room 648 Brennan MacCallum Building A18

Phone: +61 2 9351 4512
Fax: +61 2 9351 2319

Yiyan Wang 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 was 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.

Research areas

• Dr Wang's 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.

Current projects

1. 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.
2. 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 analyses their possibilities of cultural citizenship in Australia society.
3. 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.

Selected publications

Scholarly books

• Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World. London: Routledge, 2006.

Scholarly book chapters

• “The Chinese Novel” (6000-word essay), Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. Olakunle George, Oxford: Blackwell, accepted for publication, 22 October 2009.
• (with Ge Hongbing) “Xin xiaofei wenhua dui Zhabei shehui shengtai de yingxiang: yi Daning guoji shangye guangchang weili” (Impact of new consumer culture on the community ecology of Zhabei in Shanghai: a case study of Daning international shopping plaza”. Wenheng (Literary criticism), ed. Zhang Yinpeng, Shanghai: Shanghai University Press, 2009, 36-390.
• “The Emperor and the Assassin: China’s National Hero and the Myth of State Origins”. Global Chinese Media: the Culture and Politics of Hero. eds. Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley. London: Routledge, accepted for publication 30 June 2009.
• “Chinese Agony over Modernism: the Dubious Agency of Colonial Subjects” in Bryna Goodman and David Goodman, eds., Twentieth Century Colonialism and China. Accepted for publication on 23 December 2008.
• “Shuo jiayuan xiangqing, tan guozu shenfen: shi lun Jia Pingwa xiangtu xiaoshuo” (From native place to national identity: on Jia Pingwa’s rural fiction), Gao Yuanbao and Zhang Ranran, eds., Jia Pingwa yanjiu ziliao (Research resources on Jia Pingwa studies), Tianjin: Tianjin renmin, 2005: 366-382.
• ‘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, 2004: 455-477.

Refereed journal articles

• “Shihuang yu cike: Zhongguo guozu yingxiong ji guojia qiyuan de biaoshu” (Emperor Qin and his assassins: China’s national hero and expressions of statism). Journal of Guangxi University for Nationalities. vol. 30, no.5 (Sept. 2008), 26-31.
• “Rules of Art: Cultural Citizenship and Multicultural Aesthetics in Australia”, Cultural Studies and Literary Theory, vol.16, 2008, 248-264.
• “Venturing into Shanghai: the Flâneur in Two of Shi Zhicun’s Short Stories”, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 19, no. 2 (Fall 2007), 34 – 70.
• “The Emperor and the Assassin: China’s National Hero and Myth of State Origin”, Media Asia: an Asian Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1, 2007, 14-19.
• “Rules of Art: Cultural Citizenship and Multicultural Aesthetics in Australia”, Cultural Studies and Literary Theory, vol. 16, January 2008, pp. 248-264. (An abridged version of this article was published in IIAS Newsletter, no. 34, July 2004, pp. 5-7.)
• “Literary Nativism, the Native Place and Modern Chinese Fiction”, Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, vol. 4, no. 1(2007) (Portal online).
• “Shanghai Modernity: Women and the Practice of Everyday Life”, Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 17, no 1, 2007: 173-188.
• “The Flâneur in Shanghai in Chinese Modernist Writing”, Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 15, no.2, December 2005: 13-25.
• "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, 2004: 33-38.

Areas of teaching and research supervision

Dr Wang's 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.

She supervises honours, masters and PhD students in modern and contemporary literary studies and cultural studies.

Other professional contributions

Book editor for JOSA: The Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia.