This dissertation treats the life and works of one of the most popular women writers in the history of modern Chinese literature, Zhang Ailing. The first part of the dissertation aims to account some of the major events in Zhang's life so that the reader is able to envision the genesis of an unconventional writer who lived the life of a pariah both home and abroad. The second part of the dissertation analyzes Zhang's deromanticizing concept of love and marriage as presented in Zhang's popular romances and her possible impact on Zhangpai writers across the Taiwan Strait.;The dissertation contains five chapters. Chapter One emphasizes Zhang's aristocratic family background, her being a product of both Eastern and Western values, and her detached attitude toward politics and life. Chapter Two addresses Zhang's marginal literary status. Her stories model neither on the mainstream May Fourth patriotism nor the sentimentalism of the traditional Butterfly fiction. Unlike the two groups of writers who affirm love, Zhang handles the romantic genre with a pessimistic outlook. Chapter Three discusses Zhang's unique concept of love and marriage: true love can only exist in a vacuum-like situation. Worldly concerns in general hinder its growth. Similarly, marriage, which is love institutionalized, will kill love for the banality of married life. Chapter Four presents Zhang's influence on four representative women writers from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. Like Zhang, these writers employ the genre of popular romance to question conventional notions of love and marriage. The conclusion stresses "authenticity" and "decontexutalization" as the key epithets of Zhang's philosophies of life, love, and literature. Her life and her works evince that being marginal is definitely not an obstacle for a writer of integrity.
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