Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Style and Excerpts
• Introduction: Toward a Spatialized Understanding of Women's Literary Tanci
• Chapter One: Vernacular Literacy, Cross-Dressing, and Feminine Authority in Zhu Suxian's Yulianhuan (Linked Rings of Jade)
• Chapter Two: Among Women: Feminine Homoeroticism in Li Guiyu's Liuhuameng (Dream of the Pomegranate Flowers)
• Chapter Three: Gender, Syncretism, and Female Exemplarity: Jin Fangquan's Qizhenzhuan (A Tale of Exceptional Chastity)
• Chapter Four: "Beyond Rouge and Powder": Rewriting Female Talent in Sun Deying's Jinyuyuan (Affinity of the Golden Fish)
• Chapter Five: A New Romance of the Nation-State: On Wang Oushang's Zixuji (A Tale of Vacuity)
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author

About the Author

Li Guo teaches Chinese language, literature, culture, and Asian literatures at Utah State University. Her interests in scholarship include late imperial and modern Chinese women's narratives, folk literature, film, and comparative literature. Guo's research displays an interdisciplinary approach, bridging women and gender studies, narrative theory, vernacular literatures and cultures, bringing an innovative perspective to traditional, text-based analysis of tanci fiction. She is the author of Women's Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China.