Journal article Open Access
Ho, Elizabeth
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?> <resource xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://datacite.org/schema/kernel-4" xsi:schemaLocation="http://datacite.org/schema/kernel-4 http://schema.datacite.org/meta/kernel-4.1/metadata.xsd"> <identifier identifierType="DOI">10.5281/zenodo.2628454</identifier> <creators> <creator> <creatorName>Ho, Elizabeth</creatorName> <givenName>Elizabeth</givenName> <familyName>Ho</familyName> <affiliation>University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong</affiliation> </creator> </creators> <titles> <title>Last Empress Fiction and Asian Neo-Victorianism</title> </titles> <publisher>Zenodo</publisher> <publicationYear>2019</publicationYear> <dates> <date dateType="Issued">2019-04-04</date> </dates> <language>en</language> <resourceType resourceTypeGeneral="Text">Journal article</resourceType> <alternateIdentifiers> <alternateIdentifier alternateIdentifierType="url">https://zenodo.org/record/2628454</alternateIdentifier> </alternateIdentifiers> <relatedIdentifiers> <relatedIdentifier relatedIdentifierType="DOI" relationType="IsVersionOf">10.5281/zenodo.2628453</relatedIdentifier> </relatedIdentifiers> <rightsList> <rights rightsURI="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</rights> <rights rightsURI="info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess">Open Access</rights> </rightsList> <descriptions> <description descriptionType="Abstract"><p>This article claims that &lsquo;Last Empress&rsquo; fiction about the Empress Dowager Cixi reveals the postcolonial ethics of Anglophone neo-Victorianism. &lsquo;Last Empress&rsquo; texts naturally tend to be bookended by the narrative of a na&iuml;ve yet ambitious teenage concubine entering the imperial palace and the image of the Empress Dowager, as depicted in Bernardo Bertolucci&rsquo;s 1987 film, <em>The Last Emperor</em>, rotting on her deathbed. This emphasis on Cixi&rsquo;s ageing body as a metaphor for China&rsquo;s perceived humiliations in the past manages and contains, for Western readers, a similar commodification of &lsquo;China&rsquo; as a new economic and political powerhouse and brand. This article reads a range of &lsquo;Last Empress&rsquo; texts from Anchee Min&rsquo;s popular historical fiction, <em>Empress Orchid</em> (2004) and <em>The Last Empress</em> (2007), to metafictional critiques such as Da Chen&rsquo;s <em>My Last Empress</em> (2012) and Linda Jaivin&rsquo;s <em>The Empress Lover</em> (2014), to the Singaporean blockbuster musical, <em>Forbidden City: Portrait of an Empress</em> (2002), and situates them amongst arguments about race, ageing and neo-Orientalism. Cixi&rsquo;s continued visibility in biographies, fiction, and film recasts conventional understandings of neo-Victorianism as neo-Victorian gerontology: the problematics of rejuvenating (women in) the past, (post-)feminist &lsquo;time crisis&rsquo;, and new kinds of invisibility for women past and present. At the same time, &lsquo;Last Empress&rsquo; fiction offers opportunities to reflect on the geographical pressures Asia can put on the &lsquo;neo-&rsquo; in the term &lsquo;neo-Victorian&rsquo; and the difficulties of performing truly global neo-Victorian readings.</p></description> </descriptions> </resource>
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