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As a girl growing up in Hong Kong, Eva Wong heard and memorized many tales told to her by Hong Kong's finest professional storytellers, by actors on the radio, and by her grandmother. These popular tales of the Taoist immortals were also often dramatized in Chinese operas. The stories are of famous characters in Chinese history and myth: a hero's battle with the lords of evil, the founder of the Ming dynasty's treacherous betrayal of his friends, a young girl who saves her town by imitating rooster calls. Entertaining and often provocative, these tales usually include a moral. The immortals are role models in Chinese culture, as well as examples of enlightenment. Some of the immortals were healers, some were social activists, some were aristocrats, and some were entrepreneurs. The tales chosen by Eva Wong here are of the best-known immortals among the Chinese. Their names are household words and their stories are told and retold by one generation to the next.
In the current English-language publication market, this book is one of the earliest academic monographs to comparatively investigate different feminist scholars and academic feminism across the Taiwan Strait. It problematizes recent scholarly understanding of feminist complexity in various Chinese-speaking areas. This book addresses sociocultural backgrounds of how Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong feminist scholars strategize their transfers, localization, and acculturation of Western feminist literary theories. It emphasizes how Chinese literary theorists filter, gate-keep, select, import latest Western feminist theories, and then match them with local socio-cultural trends by exerting comparative researchers' cross-cultural and cross-lingual academic power in order to tackle Mainland China's, Taiwan's, and Hong Kong's own gender problems.
"A very important study of one of the most important institutions in Chinese history, one without which the China we have today would certainly be a vastly different place."—Peter Bol, author of "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China
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