Readings or reader-response criticism refers to the different literary approaches that can be taken to a text and focuses on the relationship between the reader/responder and the text. The reader/responder creates the meaning of the text, interpreting it through their own context. This context will not be the same as the composer's context, hence the possibility for shifts in interpretation or readings between composer and responder and also between different responders.

A text like Jung Chang's Wild Swans can be read as, for example, a social text, a political text or an historical text.

• A social text will reflect life in specified communities and will be concerned with the relationships between the members of those communities and the hierarchies within those communities.

Wild Swans focuses on China as power changes from imperial to communist and is reflected through the changes to generations of Jung Chang's family during that time.

• A political text will examine and organisation and its affairs, commenting on policies.

Wild Swans, through the detail of family life in China, reflects on the upheaval and instability caused by the fall of imperial rule and comments on the impact of Communist rule on ordinary people.

• An historical text deals with events in history, the past.

Wild Swans represents a significant period in modern Chinese history from the perspective of personal recount. It is an historical record and a perspective on history.

Form in literary writing

A text can be seen as an example of different forms in literary writing, such as:

• a family saga

The saga originated in medieval Iceland and revolved around a known hero or family or the exploits of heroic kings and warriors. The novel as a saga evolved from these narratives about the life of a large family over a long period of time.

Although Wild Swans is not fiction it is a narrative about the life of a family over three generations and during tumultuous events in twentieth century China.

• An autobiography is the account of a person's life written him or her self. Wild Swans is about Jung Chang's life but also about the generations before her, which form her motivation for writing.

Resources

• Background information on Mao's China

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A5141369

• Biographical information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung_Chang

• This is a scholarly article looking at the purpose for writing the book, Wild Swans

http://jgalith.univ-lyon2.fr/Actes/articleAsPDF/CHEN_MAO_pdf_20061026124926;jsessionid=03F933EB36B24F39E160AAE47DA8946F.presbdd2

• An ABC 7.30 Report interview with Jung Chang conducted by Kerry O'Brien

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1419692.htm

• The Wikipedia page on Wild Swans - includes a section on reception

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Swans

• A review from the Sydney Morning Herald

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/a-swans-little-book-of-ire/2005/10/07/1128563003642.html

• This link refers to banning of Wild Swans in China.  It is from p.114 of

  Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian American Women's Writing, by Helena Grice

  http://books.google.com/books?id=1pxnOLUeY7gC&pg=PA114&lpg=PA114&dq=china's+response+to+wild+swans&source=web&ots=SM7ixGqQcX&sig=58iH06uxHIBAHaYVgyposBgd9yM