One of the pleasures of reviewing a text is the necessity of reading the whole book. Judith T. Zeitlin's The Phantom Heroine is an ideal text for this, as the connections made across literature and culture are intellectually enjoyable and often genuinely new. Zeitlin's theme is the female revenant in fiction and drama during the heyday of Chinese ghost literature (1580–1700). She explores this in a fourfold division: the ghost's body, the ghost's voice, the ghost in historical time, and the ghost on stage.
It does not seem fifteen years since Zeitlin's earlier volume on Pu Songling (Historian of the Strange [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993]) emerged to find its way onto every classical syllabus in the hemisphere. The same themes of gender and the strange are key here, but with a wider range of texts and a more specifically ghostly focus. In seeking to move beyond the...
