ABSTRACT
Contemporary Chinese women's writing, prolific and popular at home, has enjoyed scant attention internationally. Promoted by the post-Mao liberation movement and propelled by China's new market economy, it has now begun to find receptive audiences beyond China's borders. In this book we consider a variety of genres — from serious literary fiction and autobiographical novels to popular novels and blogsites; from representations of the lives of silenced rural women to the ghostly traces of historically demonized subjects of Chinese history; from women's nostalgic recollections of early Shanghai to the harsh realism of migrant workers lives; from street-wise ‘beauty writers’ to epic tales of matriarchal lineages infused with magic realism. These texts iterate an array of possibilities for figuring and refiguring women as subjects in modern China as they renegotiate gender relations and wrest ‘the personal’ from the residues of the socialist, class-based past.
