This book studies the formation of the male-constructed conventional voice of women in Chinese literature from the 3rd to 6th century. It highlights specific moments during which the feminine voice became recognized, accepted, and stabilized, including the shift of focus from the performative to the textual in female representations; the formation of a male literary community; the popularity of romanticized historical narratives; and the emerging sense of literary history. This study emphasizes the historicity of the feminine voice and strives to question and challenge established notions about textual stability, authorship, the literary canon, and literary history.

The image and voice of abandoned women are a familiar topic to students of classical Chinese poetry. This book explores the formation of the conventional, male-constructed voice of women, characterized by the expression of loneliness and resentment by a lady longing for an absent lover.

Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice considers the effects on poetic voice of a conventional feminine persona, the abandoned woman, in early Chinese song lyric (ci) poems. The author reads the literary cross-dressing and ventriloquism of these mostly male-authored poems in light of the highly indeterminate Chinese poetic language, resulting in a consideration of persona and poetic voice of interest to scholars of lyric poetry in any language.

Queering Modernist Translation explores translations by Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and H.D. through the concept of queering translation. As Bancroft argues, queering translation is an intersectional lens for gleaning identity and socio-cultural issues in translation, such as gender, sexuality, diaspora, and race. Using theories espoused by Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, Elizabeth Grosz, Sara Ahmed, and Rinaldo Walcott as foundations for his arguments, Bancroft demonstrates that queering translation offers more expansive ways of imagining the relationship between translation and the identities, cultures, and societies that produce them. Intervening in new Modernist studies and translation studies, Queering Modernist Translation furthers contemporary conversations regarding Modernism and its lasting importance in the twenty-first century.

In Engendering the Woman Question, Zhang Yun examines the early Chinese women’s periodical press as a mixed-gender public space to explore men’s and women’s gender-specific approaches to a series of prominent topics central to the Chinese “woman question.”

"Compiled in 940 at the court of the kingdom of Shu, the Huajian ji is the earliest extant collection of song lyrics by literati poets. The collection has traditionally been studied as the precursor to the lyrics of the Song dynasty, or in terms of what it contributed to the later development of the genre. But scholars have rarely examined the work as an anthology, and have more often focused on the work of individual poets and their respective contributions to the genre. In this book, Anna Shields examines the influence of court culture on the creation of the anthology and the significance of imitation and convention in its lyrics. Shields suggests that by considering the Huajian ji only in terms of its contributions to a later “model,” we unnecessarily limit ourselves to a single literary form, and risk overlooking the broader influence of Tang culture on the Huajian ji. By illuminating the historical and literary contexts of the anthology, the author aims to situate the Huajian ji within larger questions of Chinese literary history, particularly the influence of cultural forces on the emergence of genres and the development of romantic literature."

“Outside of her remarkable poems, we know next to nothing about Yu Xuanji,” David Young writes. “She was born in 844 and died in 868, at the age of twenty-four, condemned to death for the murder of her maid…We owe the survival of her forty-nine poems to the ancient Chinese anthologists’ urge to be complete.” The poems gathered in this bilingual (Chinese/English) edition will be read again and again for their beauty. The works preserve Yu Xuanji’s passion, her sharp eye for detail, her often witty variations on familiar Chinese themes, all of which give the poems an immediacy one rarely finds in ancient, translated texts. Poems addressed to Yu Xuanji’s husband and to other men (some famous poets) and women give us some sense of her relationships; the book also includes other traditional Chinese forms such as meditations on landscapes and occasional poems commemorating feast days. As noted in the introduction, the poetry also provokes us to think about the act of writing, about the culture and politics of the T’ang Dynasty, and about gender.