Title: China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature. Edited by Yingjin Zhang. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. xii, 307 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $19–95 (paper).
Abstract: Introduction: engaging Chinese comparative literature and cultural studies Yingjin Zhang Part I. Discipline, Discourse, Canon: 1. The challenge of East-West comparative literature Zhang Longxi 2. The utopias of discourse: on the impossibility of Chinese comparative literature David Palumbo-Liu 3. Canon formation in traditional Chinese poetry: Chinese canons, sacred and profane Mark E. Francis Part II. Gender, Sexuality, Body: 4. A feminist re-vision of Xu Wei's Ci Mulan and Nü zhuangyuan Ann-Marie Hsiung 5. Gender, subjectivity, sexuality: defining a subversive discourse in Wang Anyi's four tales of sexual transgression Helen H. Chen 6. Consuming Asian women: the fluid body of Josie Packard in Twin Peaks Greta Ai-Yu Niu Part III. Science, Modernity, Aesthetics: 7. Travel and translation: an aspect of china's cultural modernity, 1862-1926 John Yu Zou 8. Baoyu in Wonderland: technological Utopia in the early modern Chinese science fiction novel Feng-Ying Ming 9. The texture of the metropolis: modernist inscriptions of Shanghai in the 1930s Yingjin Zhang 10. The cult of poetry in contemporary China Michelle Yeh 11. Tianya, the ends of the world or the edge of heaven: comparative literature at the fin de siecle Eugene Chen Eoyang.