by Aijun Zhu (2007)
This book deconstructs the controversy of globally located Chinese women authors, including Maxine Hong Kingston (America), Wei Hui (Mainland China), Li Ang (Taiwan), and Li Bihua (Hong Kong). It vividly shows how these authors are trapped in a dilemma between feminism, nationalism, and neocolonialism complicated by the powerful influences of global popular culture. This book not only engages in the much debated major issues such as gender, nation, narration and globalization, but more profoundly, it also points out the cultural and political significance of literary and cultural criticism, a much neglected area of research. The author's detailed examination of Chinese nationalism from the perspectives of gender and globalization shows her sharp awareness of the changing geopolitical mapping of Chineseness. Critics of Chinese literature and culture will benefit from this work in this era of social and political changes.
Brenda F. Berrian and Aart Broek
For review see: Sue N. Greene, in Nieuwe West-Indische Gids / New West Indian Guide, vol. 65, no. 1 & 2 (1991); p. 94-96; Jennifer Jackson, in The Caribbean Writer, vol. 5 (1991); p. 125-126; Stefanie Gehrke, in Caribbean writers = Les auteurs Caribéens, ed. by Marlies Glaser & Marion Pausch (1994); p. 226.
Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
This is the first study of puritan women's place in early modern intellectual culture. Puritan women have suffered a double prejudice: that women were excluded from male culture, and that puritanism was hostile to many forms of culture. This collection argues that early modern women's puritanism formed and developed rather than prohibited their substantial and leading contributions to their culture. The essays introduce recently discovered writers such as Elizabeth Isham and Elizabeth Melville and new analyses of well-known writers such as Lady Mary Sidney Herbert and Anne Locke, and also highlight the local, national, and international dimensions of early modern puritan culture. With a foreword by N. H. Keeble and afterword by David Norbrook and fifteen essays by leading scholars of early modern literature and history, this collection reveals an intellectual culture characterized by networks of patronage, translation, manuscript circulation and correspondence. - Publisher.
Pamela Chester & Sibelan Forrester
Engendering Slavic Literatures breaks new ground in its investigation of gender and feminist issues in Croatian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian literary texts by both female and male writers. Drawing on psychoanalytic approaches, film theory, and lesbian and gender theory, the authors interrogate the received notions of Western gender studies to see which can be usefully applied to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Slavic literary works. Motherhood and the relationships of mothers and daughters; the myths of selfhood that shape the autobiographies of Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Lidiia Ginzburg, and Lev Tolstoy; Polish Catholicism and sexuality; portrayals of landscape in verbal and visual art; and women writers' transgressive ventures into male bastions such as the love lyric and prose fiction are among the themes of this important and innovative volume.
Lydia H. Liu
This study - bridging contemporary theory, Chinese history, comparative literature, and culture studies - analyzes the historical interactions among China, Japan, and the West in terms of "translingual practice." By this term, the author refers to the process by which new words, meanings, discourses, and modes of representation arose, circulated, and acquired legitimacy in early modern China as it contacted/collided with European/Japanese languages and literatures. In reexamining the rise of modern Chinese literature in this context, the book asks three central questions: How did "modernity" and "the West" become legitimized in May Fourth literary discourse? What happened to native agency in this complex process of legitimation? How did the Chinese national culture imagine and interpret its own moment of unfolding? . After the first chapter, which deals with the theoretical issues, ensuing chapters treat particular instances of translingual practice such as national character, individualism, stylistic innovations, first-person narration, and canon formation.