This book deconstructs the controversy of globally located Chinese women authors, including Maxine Hong Kingston (America), Wei Hui (Mainland China), Li Ang (Taiwan), and Li Bihua (Hong Kong). It vividly shows how these authors are trapped in a dilemma between feminism, nationalism, and neocolonialism complicated by the powerful influences of global popular culture. This book not only engages in the much debated major issues such as gender, nation, narration and globalization, but more profoundly, it also points out the cultural and political significance of literary and cultural criticism, a much neglected area of research. The author's detailed examination of Chinese nationalism from the perspectives of gender and globalization shows her sharp awareness of the changing geopolitical mapping of Chineseness. Critics of Chinese literature and culture will benefit from this work in this era of social and political changes. "The book is an ambitious, original, and provocative study of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture . this book brings a fresh approach to the developing field of Chinese feminist studies and to the field of Chinese literary criticism." - Professor Jianmei Liu, University of Maryland, College Park

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the 17th Inter- tional Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS 2008), held in York University, Toronto, Canada, May 21-23, 2008. ISMIS is a conference series started in 1986. Held twice every three years, ISMIS provides an inter- tional forum for exchanging scienti?c research and technological achievements in building intelligent systems. Its goal is to achieve a vibrant interchange - tween researchers and practitioners on fundamental and advanced issues related to intelligent systems. ISMIS 2008featureda selectionof latestresearchworkandapplicationsfrom the following areas related to intelligent systems: active media human-computer interaction, autonomic and evolutionary computation, digital libraries, intel- gent agent technology, intelligent information retrieval, intelligent information systems, intelligent language processing, knowledge representation and integ- tion, knowledge discovery and data mining, knowledge visualization, logic for arti?cial intelligence, soft computing, Web intelligence, and Web services. - searchers and developers from 29 countries submitted more than 100 full - pers to the conference. Each paper was rigorously reviewed by three committee members and external reviewers. Out of these submissions, 40% were selected as regular papers and 22% as short papers. ISMIS 2008 also featured three plenary talks given by John Mylopoulos, Jiawei Han and Michael Lowry. They spoke on their recent research in age- oriented software engineering, information network mining, and intelligent so- ware engineering tools, respectively.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Rough Sets, Fuzzy Sets, Data Mining, and Granular Computing, RSFDGrC 2007, held in Toronto, Canada in May 2007 in conjunction with the Second International Conference on Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology, RSKT 2007, both as part of the Joint Rough Set Symposium, JRS 2007.

The 65 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 319 general submissions to the JRS 2007 symposium. The papers are organized in topical sections on fuzzy-rough hybridization, fuzzy sets, soft computing in medical image processing, soft computing in information retrieval, clustering, text and Web mining, learning, data mining and rough classifiers, granular computing, soft computing in multimedia processing, soft computing applications, and rough and complex concepts.