Amy Dooling - Böcker

Writing Women in Modern China is the first major anthology in English to highlight the contributions of women to modern literary culture with respect to the heated gender debates of early twentieth-century China. Featuring examples of fiction, drama, autobiography, essays, and poetry by eighteen writers, many of whom have been neglected by mainstream literary history, this collection demonstrates the creative diversity in modern women's writing. The editors' introduction charts key developments in the study of gender, literature, and women's writing in modern China and provides an overview of the relevant historical events of this century's first three decades. From Qiu Jin's experimental narrative Stones of the Kingwei Bird, one of the earliest fictional representations of women's liberation from the traditional Confucian family, to Bing Xin's "Our Mistress's Parlor," which presents a satire of an intellectual salon in 1930s Shanghai, Writing Women in Modern China offers an unrivaled opportunity to explore an important body of imaginative work.

Revolution, foreign occupation, and political, cultural, and economic upheavals defined mid-twentieth-century Chinese society. This new anthology, a sequel to the acclaimed first volume, compiled by Dooling and Kristina Torgeson and covering the early twentieth century, includes an impressive range of literary, personal, and journalistic responses to these tumultuous events. 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. Biographical information on the writers-including Yang Gang, Bai Wei, Hu Lanxi, Yang Jiang, Zong Pu, Chen Ruoxi, and others-introduces the selections from their works. Dooling's critical introduction and bibliographical materials further enrich readers'understanding of the role of women's writing in Chinese literary modernity.