The "phantom heroine"--in particular the fantasy of her resurrection   through sex with a living man--is one of the most striking features of   traditional Chinese literature. Even today the hypersexual female ghost   continues to be a source of fascination in East Asian media, much like the   sexually predatory vampire in American and European movies, TV, and novels.   But while vampires can be of either gender, erotic Chinese ghosts are   almost exclusively female. The significance of this gender asymmetry in   Chinese literary history is the subject of Judith Zeitlin's elegantly   written and meticulously researched new book.Zeitlin's study centers on   the seventeenth century, one of the most interesting and creative periods   of Chinese literature and politically one of the most traumatic, witnessing   the overthrow of the Ming, the Manchu conquest, and the subsequent founding   of the Qing. Drawing on fiction, drama, poetry, medical cases, and visual   culture, the author departs from more traditional literary studies, which   tend to focus on a single genre or author. Ranging widely across   disciplines, she integrates detailed analyses of great literary works with   insights drawn from the history of medicine, art history, comparative   literature, anthropology, religion, and performance studies. The   Phantom Heroine probes the complex literary and cultural roots of the   Chinese ghost tradition. Zeitlin is the first to address its most   remarkable feature: the phenomenon of verse attributed to phantom   writers--that is, authors actually reputed to be spirits of the deceased.   She also makes the case for the importance of lyric poetry in developing a   ghostly aesthetics and image code. Most strikingly, Zeitlin shows that the   representation of female ghosts, far from being a marginal preoccupation,   expresses cultural concerns of central importance: the interrelationship   between love and death, sexuality and fertility, disease and the body; the   construction of a subjective voice for the dead as a means to test the   promise of literary immortality; the nature of historical time and the   present's mourning of the past, particularly in the context of dynastic   fall and conquest; and, finally, the theater's ability to undo death and   resurrect the past by staging the reunion between body and   soul.Ambitious and erudite, this book should appeal to readers   interested in Chinese studies, gender studies, comparative literature,   performance studies, the history of religion, and of course, ghost stories   and the occult.

The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventheenth-century Chinese Literature PDF

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