Yun Zhu has examined sisterhood across a wide body of primary texts, bringing multiple genres in dialogue with each other. In so doing she has opened the door for further dialogue about women’s shared community and emotional bond within the larger framework of modernity, national culture, and human emancipation. She shows us that there is no female collective without its multiple others. The “elasticity” of sisterhood, appropriated broadly, does not tell us more about women’s shared experience, but the uses to which their union are strategically employed.

Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China

This well-researched and tightly argued book demonstrates the centrality of an imagined female community, rallying around the notion of 'sisterhood,' in the construction of modern Chinese nationalism and Chinese modernity.

Ping Zhu, University of Oklahoma

Yun Zhu’s cutting-edge and eye-opening book offers an important and inspiring study of sisterhood imaginations from late Qing to mid-Republican China. Built upon substantial archival studies, the chapters are thematically woven together and offer a nuanced, rigorous and interdisciplinary analysis of a broad array of sisterhood narratives in diverse genres, including traditional chantefable fiction, modern novellas, short stories, film and periodicals. Refreshing, timely, and well-researched, this compelling study urges readers to confront and critically assess the complexities, paradoxes and hybridizations of female subjectivities in China’s long process of transition toward modernity in a shifting global context.

Li Guo, Utah State University