Competing Discourses

Know about the book -

Competing Discourses is written by Maram Epstein and published by BRILL. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1684173515 (ISBN 10) and 9781684173518 (ISBN 13).

"In the traditional Chinese symbolic vocabulary, the construction of gender was never far from debates about ritual propriety, desire, and even cosmic harmony. Competing Discourses maps the aesthetic and semantic meanings associated with gender in the Ming–Qing vernacular novel through close readings of five long narratives: Marriage Bonds to Awaken the World, Dream of the Red Chamber, A Country Codger’s Words of Exposure, Flowers in the Mirror, and A Tale of Heroic Lovers. Maram Epstein argues that the authors of these novels manipulated gendered terms to achieve structural coherence. These patterns are, however, frequently at odds with other gendered structures in the texts, and authors exploited these conflicts to discuss the problem of orthodox behavior versus the cult of feeling."