Different Views on Sexes among Contemporary Male and Female Writers

Abstract

Song Yongyi wrote an article in issue 5 of Literary Review in which he compiled some rudimentary statistics on thirty novels written by ten contemporary male and female writers (three novels each) published in the period 1980-1984. The writers were Wang Meng, Lu Yanzhou, Zhang Xuan, Jiang Zilong, Zhang Xianliang, Zhang Jie, Zhang Xinxin, ZhangKangkang, Lu Xing'er, and Yu Luojin. The main theme of their stories waslove. From the statistics Song came up with the following: 1. In works by male writers the use of males as protagonists is four tofive times higher than the use of females as protagonists. In works by female writers, however, most protagonists are females.