About Dr Yiyan Wang
Dr Yiyan 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.
Dr 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.
Current projects
- 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 analyses 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.
Selected publications
- [Book] Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World. London: Routledge, 2006.
- [Book Chapter] 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.
- [Book Chapter] 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.
- [Book Chapter] 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.
- [Book Chapter[ 2000, ‘Settlers or Sojourners: Multicultural Subjectivity of Chinese-Australian Artists in Sydney’, Ien Ang and others eds. Alter Asians, Pluto Press, 107-22.