Collecting the Self

Know about the book -

Collecting the Self is written by Sing-chen Lydia Chiang and published by BRILL. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 9047414845 (ISBN 10) and 9789047414841 (ISBN 13).

Chinese strange tale collections contain short stories about ghosts and animal spirits, supra-human heroes and freaks, exotic lands and haunted homes, earthquake and floods, and other perceived “anomalies” to accepted cosmic and social norms. As such, this body of literature is a rich repository of Chinese myths, folklore, and unofficial “histories”. These collections also reflect Chinese attitudes towards normalcy and strangeness, perceptions of civilization and barbarism, and fantasies about self and other. Inspired in part by Freud’s theory of the uncanny, this book explores the emotive subtexts of late imperial strange tale collections to consider what these stories tell us about suppressed cultural anxieties, the construction of gender, and authorial self-identity.