yuanyang hudie pai

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Mandarin 鸳鸯蝴蝶派 (yuānyāng-húdié pài, literally “Mandarin ducks and butterflies school”).

Noun

yuanyang hudie pai (uncountable)

1. A type of Chinese fiction modeled after classical romances involving a tragic love between an effeminate male protagonist and a tender young woman.
   • 2000, Tamkang Review - Volume 31, Issues 1-3:

     There is no good reason to keep replicating the terminological blunders and ideological biases of the anti-popular May Fourth critics, who used yuanyang hudie pai xiaoshuo as a sweeping epithet of dismissal for rival turf on the literary scene.

   • 2003, Joshua S. Mostow, The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, →ISBN, page 355:

     The Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school (yuanyang hudie pai; henceforth Butterfly) has its origins in the mid-1910s boom in commercial periodicals.

   • 2008, Women, Men, Love and Sexual Discourse in Ye Lingfeng's Fiction, →ISBN, page 18:

     Even a shallow reading tells us that some of Ye's stories have features of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School (yuanyang hudie pai 鸳鸯蝴蝶派).

   • 2009, Roland Altenburger, The Sword Or the Needle, →ISBN:

     Leftist critics coined for them the depreciative polemical label yuanyang-hudie pai 鸳鸯蝴蝶派, "Mandarin-ducks-and-butterflies School", and construed in their critical discourse the overwhelmingly negative image of popular fiction as a purely commercial product for superficial entertainment and diversion, steeped in old-fashioned values and atavistic modes of behaviour, and adhering to outdated literary forms and techniques.