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.
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