The Politics of Aesthetics: Agential Elders and Ecological Entanglements in Xiao Hong’s Literary World

This thesis examines Xiao Hong’s (1911–1942) literary world from the perspectives of ecocriticism and critical age studies. I revisit the early twentieth-century intellectual sphere shaped by activity-centric speed culture to examine how Xiao Hong was perceived as an elderly writer and how she identified herself as an old woman in solidarity with marginalized elders. In contrast to Xiao Jun’s Village in August, I argue that Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death unfolds an inter-affective universe in which elders and nonhumans exhibit historical agency derived from bodily contact and affect. Compared with Shen Congwen’s Border Town, I further investigate Xiao Hong’s dark-ecological aesthetics in Tales of Hulan River, which appropriates “myriad things” from Zhuangzi and resonates with Jane Bennett’s vital materialism in foregrounding the transformative power of quotidian objects. Overall, Xiao Hong’s writings disrupt geontological politics that distinguish humans from nonhumans and disempower elders and rural areas.