The Perturbed Self

By comparison of the late nineteenth-century ghost stories between China and Britain, this monograph traces the entangled dynamics between ghost story writing, history-making and the molding of a gendered self. Associated with times of anxiety, groups under marginalization and tensions with orthodox narratives, ghost stories from two distinguished literary traditions are explored through the writings and lives of four innovative writers of this period, namely Xuan Ding and Wang Tao in China and Vernon Lee and E. Nesbit in Britain. Through this cross-cultural investigation, the book illuminates how a gendered self is constructed in each culture and what cultural baggage and assets are brought into this construction. It also ventures to sketch a common poetics underlying a 'literature of the anomaly' that can be both destabilizing and constructive, subversive and coercive. This book will be welcomed by the community of gothic studies, as well as scholars working in the fields of women's writing, nineteenth-century British literature and Chinese literature--