The phantom heroine
This book probes the complex literary and cultural roots of the Chinese ghost tradition. The author shows that the representation of female ghosts 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.
- Creator
- Zeitlin, Judith T.