For elite women during the last years of the Qing dynasty, new opportunities and imperatives both beckoned and threatened. In the rush to claim the “new woman” as an agent of modernity or revolution, progress and prejudice combined to erase an older model of the talented woman, the cainü, with her command of poetry and traditional arts. The twelve essays in Different Worlds of Discourse show us the complexities of gender identity during the years between China's traumatic defeat by Japan in 1895 and the birth of Republican China in 1912.
Different Worlds of Discourse is organized into three sections: “Transformations of Gender Roles,” with essays by Harriet T. Zurndorfer, Hu Ying, Grace S. Fong, and Xiaoping Cong; “Transformations of Genres,” with essays by Joan Judge, Jing Tsu, and Ellen Widmer; and “The Production of Gender and Genres in New Print Media,” with essays by Rudolf G. Wagner, Nanxiu...
