The literary reputations of Eileen Chang and Vladimir Nabokov

Cong Yin, Purdue University

Abstract

Eileen Chang made her reputation writing stories about women for magazines in Shanghai in the 1940s; her depiction of the social oppression of young girls gave her a reputation that has increased over the years, despite the failures of her two patently anti-Communist American novels. Anti-Communism also ruined Nabokov's reputation during his lifetime; his political dystopia Bend Sinister (financed by a Guggenheim grant [June 1943-June 1944] as Chang was financed by the News Section of Consulate General of the United States in Hongkong) was not a success. But in the long run his depiction of the tortured little girl Lolita has sustained his reputation and popularity, just as Chang today is considered one of the great Chinese writers of the twentieth century for her portraits of the vicious world of girls. Although Eileen Chang's literary career fell apart after she came to America from China in the 1950s during the same years that Vladimir Nabokov, another foreign exile from a communist country, was having his greatest success with Lolita, the trajectory of their literary reputations tell us something about the long-term value of honest literary depictions. History has vindicated their anti-Communist stance, and that, combined with their depictions of young girls, has created an equally high reputation for both writers that ignores the disparity in their actual literary achievement—for Nabokov by any measure is the greater writer of the two, and one measure of that difference is probably that Nabokov was the more deceptive writer and the more devious personality. In a hundred years people will look back and see, despite the differences in their careers, the same trajectory, that of writers who produced unblinking portraits of young girls and who were uncompromising in their anti-Communism. For both their politics, although for different reasons, stood in the way of the full development of their careers in their lifetime (Nabokov never received the Nobel Prize; Chang drifted into obscurity in America) but has come back to enhance their reputations today.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Ross, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|Asian literature|American literature

Off-Campus Purdue Users:
To access this dissertation, please log in to our
proxy server
.

Share

COinS