Book Description
Since the publication of The Woman Warrior more than a quarter century ago, author Maxine Hong Kingston has enjoyed a phenomenal rise in popularity and literary importance, earning a place in the American canon as the living author most frequently taught at U.S. universities. The numerous studies of this touchstone work, however, fail to take into account the stories in China Men, which were largely written together with those in The Woman Warrior but later published separately. Although Hong Kingston's decision to separate the male and female narratives enabled readers to see the strength of the resulting feminist point of view in The Woman Warrior, this division also made it easier to overlook the literary and cultural significance of the material that was taken out and moved to China Men. Indeed in the face of the growing and disproportionate attention to the mother-daughter relationship in The Woman Warrior, Hong Kingston steadily maintained that to understand the book fully it was necessary to read its male companion text. Maureen Sabine's ambitious study of The Woman Warrior and China Men aims to bring these divided texts back together with a close reading that looks for the textual traces of the father in The Woman Warrior and shows how the daughter narrator tracks down his history in China Men. She considers theories of intertextuality that open up the possibility of a dynamic interplay between the two books and suggests that the Hong family women and men may be struggling for dialogue with each other even when they appear textually silent or apart.

About the Author
Maureen Sabine is associate professor and senior lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Maureen Sabine's study of The Woman Warrior and China Men aims to bring these divided texts back together with a close reading that looks for the textual traces of the father in The Woman Warrior and shows how the daughter narrator tracks down his history in China Men. She considers theories of intertextuality that open up the possibility of a dynamic interplay between the two books and suggests that the Hong family women and men may be struggling for dialogue with each other even when they appear textually silent or apart.

SYNOPSIS