Reimagining the Relationship Between the Individual and the Community: ‘Ernü Yingxiong’ in Chinese Web Fiction

This thesis explores the relationship between the individual and the community rendered in love narratives of Chinese web fiction, contributing to the study of love narratives around the negotiation between individual expressions and collective discourses in Chinese literature. While previous works have primarily focused on the twentieth century, this study develops existing scholarship in the contemporary and digital context. I selected eight of the most popular and influential web fiction works, each of which, I argue, constitutes a reformulation of the ernü yingxiong genre that juxtaposes the individual pursuit of love and the pursuit of collective interests. The popularity of these works suggests that they resonate with a vast readership across Chinese cyberspace, revealing widely shared values and perspectives of love, power, identity, gender, individual aspirations, and communities. The textual analysis is organised into three chapters, each examining web fiction stories set against different temporal settings: historical, contemporary, and futuristic. This approach highlights contextual constraints to individual-community relationships, providing a multifaceted observation interacting with different contexts.
The study argues that although collectivist and political discourses have accompanied and dominated the presentation of love in Chinese literature from the premodern period through the twentieth century, recent decades have seen increasing diversification. The selected web fiction works reflect upon the inherent collectivist core of ernü yingxiong, shifting the focus to the individual pursuit of love. This shift indicates the emergence of a nuanced imagination of the dynamic between individual autonomy and collective expectations, with greater priority given to the former, while individuals are connected to communities more intermittently and flexibly.