Gender, discourse and the self in literature: issues in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong

As cultural construct, gender is fictional and imagined, but is also real in its ideological and representational effects on the formation of self and identity. What is intriguing is the fiction behind the fictional, which many people accept as truth. Critiquing the fictive nature of socially accepted values about gender, the authors in this volume unravel the strategies adopted by writers and filmmakers in (de)constructing the gendered self in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.