Jin Feng proposes that representation of the "new woman" in Communist Chinese fiction of the earlier twentieth century was paradoxically one of the ways in which male writers of the era explored, negotiated, and laid claim to their own emerging identity as "modern" intellectuals.

Through both cultural and literary analysis, this book examines gender in relation to late Qing and modern Chinese intellectuals, including Mu Shiying, Bai Wei, and Lu Xun. Tackling important, previously neglected questions, Zhu ultimately shows the resilience and malleability of Chinese modernity through its progressive views on femininity.

This is a critical inquiry into the connections between emergent feminist ideologies in China and the production of 'modern' women's writing from the demise of the last imperial dynasty to the founding of the PRC. It accentuates both well-known and under-represented literary voices who intervened in the gender debates of their generation as well as contextualises the strategies used in imagining alternative stories of female experience and potential. It asks two questions: first, how did the advent of enlightened views of gender relations and sexuality influence literary practices of 'new women' in terms of narrative forms and strategies, readership, and publication venues? Second, how do these representations attest to the way these female intellectuals engaged and expanded social and political concerns from the personal to the national?

In this major new collection, an international team of scholars examine the relationship between the Chinese women's periodical press and global modernity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essays in this richly illustrated volume probe the ramifications for women of two monumental developments in this period: the intensification of China's encounters with foreign powers and a media transformation comparable in its impact to the current internet age. The book offers a distinctive methodology for studying the periodical press, which is supported by the development of a bilingual database of early Chinese periodicals. Throughout the study, essays on China are punctuated by transdisciplinary reflections from scholars working on periodicals outside of the Chinese context, encouraging readers to rethink common stereotypes about lived womanhood in modern China, and to reconsider the nature of Chinese modernity in a global context.

Although deconstruction has become a popular catchword, as an intellectual movement it has never entirely caught on within the university. For some in the academy, deconstruction, and Jacques Derrida in particular, are responsible for the demise of accountability in the study of literature. Countering these facile dismissals of Derrida and deconstruction, Herman Rapaport explores the incoherence that has plagued critical theory since the 1960s and the resulting legitimacy crisis in the humanities. Against the backdrop of a rich, informed discussion of Derrida's writings -- and how they have been misconstrued by critics and admirers alike -- The Theory Mess investigates the vicissitudes of Anglo-American criticism over the past thirty years and proposes some possibilities for reform.

The past few years have seen a burgeoning effort to rethink questions of women, writing, and gender in modern China. Here 22 works of fiction, drama, autobiography, essays, and poetry, each prefaced by the author's photograph and a short biographical sketch, introduce women whose literary careers coincided with an era of tremendous social, political, and cultural turbulence. 18 illustrations.

The figure of the New Woman, soon to become a major signpost of Chinese modernity, was in the process of being formed at the turn of the 20th century. This book shows how the construction of the New Woman was influenced by the fictional and translational representation of a range of Western female icons, including the French Revolutionary figure Madame Roland and Dumas's "Dame aux camelias.""

From succinct reportage of contemporary historical circumstances to comic accounts of twentieth-century urban living to carefully stylized modernist works of fiction, the selections in this anthology reflect the diversity, liveliness, humor, and surprising cosmopolitanism of women's writing from the period. This collection also reveals the ways in which women writers imagined and inscribed new meanings to Chinese feminism. Also included are biographical information on the writers, bibliographical materials, and a critical introduction by Dooling.

In Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Modern China, Li Guo presents the first book-length study in English of women’s tanci fiction, the distinctive Chinese form of narrative written in rhymed lines during the late imperial to early modern period (related to, but different from, the orally performed version also called tanci) She explores the tradition through a comparative analysis of five seminal texts. Guo argues that Chinese women writers of the period position the personal within the diegesis in order to reconfigure their moral commitments and personal desires. By fashioning a “feminine” representation of subjectivity, tanci writers found a habitable space of self-expression in the male-dominated literary tradition.Through her discussion of the emergence, evolution, and impact of women’s tanci, Guo shows how historical forces acting on the formation of the genre serve as the background for an investigation of cross-dressing, self-portraiture, and authorial self-representation. Further, Guo approaches anew the concept of “woman-oriented perspective” and argues that this perspective conceptualizes a narrative framework in which the heroine (s) are endowed with mobility to exercise their talent and power as social beings as men’s equals. Such a woman-oriented perspective redefines normalized gender roles with an eye to exposing women’s potentialities to transform historical and social customs in order to engender a world with better prospects for women.

Feminism, Women’s Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China focuses on a sensational elopement in the Yangzi Delta in the late 1920s to explore how middle- and lower-class members of society gained access to and appropriated otherwise alien and abstract enlightenment theories and idioms about love, marriage, and family. Via a network of communications that connected people of differing socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, non-elite women were empowered to display their new womanhood and thereby exercise their self-activating agency to mount resistance to China’s patriarchal system. Qiliang He’s text also investigates the proliferation of anti-feminist conservatisms in legal practice, scholarly discourses, media, and popular culture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Utilizing a framework of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book traverses various fields such as legal history, women’s history, popular culture/media studies, and literary studies to explore urban discourse and communication in 1920s China.