This is a critical inquiry into the connections between emergent feminist ideologies in China and the production of "modern" women's writing from the demise of the last imperial dynasty to the founding of the People's Republic of China. It accentuates both well-known and under-represented literary voices from Qiu Jin and Lu Yin to Bai Wein, who intervened in the gender debates of their generation as well as contextualizes the strategies used in imagining alternative stories of female experience and potential. It asks two questions: First, how did the advent of enlightened views of gender...