Zeitlin's study centers on the seventeenth century, one of the most interesting and creative periods of Chinese literature and politically one of the most traumatic, witnessing the overthrow of the Ming, the Manchu conquest, and the subsequent founding of the Qing. Drawing on fiction, drama, poetry, medical cases, and visual culture, the author departs from more traditional literary studies, which tend to focus on a single genre or author. Ranging widely across disciplines, she integrates detailed analyses of great literary works with insights drawn from the history of medicine, art history, comparative literature, anthropology, religion, and performance studies.
The Phantom Heroine probes the complex literary and cultural roots of the Chinese ghost tradition. Zeitlin is the first to address its most remarkable feature: the phenomenon of verse attributed to phantom writers--that is, authors actually reputed to be spirits of the deceased. She also makes the case for the importance of lyric poetry in developing a ghostly aesthetics and image code. Most strikingly, Zeitlin shows that the representation of female ghosts, far from being a marginal preoccupation, 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.
Ambitious and erudite, this book should appeal to readers interested in Chinese studies, gender studies, comparative literature, performance studies, the history of religion, and of course, ghost stories and the occult.