Buying pre-order items
Ebooks and Audiobook
You will receive an email with a download link for the ebook or audiobook on the publication date.
Payment
You will not be charged for pre-ordered books until they are available to be shipped. Pre-ordered ebooks will not be charged for until they are available for download.
Amending or cancelling your order
For orders that have not been shipped you can usually make changes to pre-orders up to 72 hours before the publishing date.
Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available
- Delivery and returns info
-
Free CA delivery on orders $40 or over
Description
By exploring various representations of illness and disability in Chinese American literature, Sarah Tang argues that narratives of ailments transcend the boundaries of medical therapy to become essential metaphors that help reconstruct identity formations for Chinese Americans.
Moving beyond medical interpretations, Tang demonstrates how conditions such as madness, infertility, amnesia, anorexia, insomnia, leprosy, and epidemic disease serve as symbolic expressions of displacement, marginalization, and resilience in the Chinese North American experience. With a focus on key works published between 1970 and 2020 by writers including Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Yan Geling, Ma Ling, Zhang Ling, and others, this book uncovers how illness metaphors illuminate the intersections of race, gender, and culture in diasporic life. By weaving literary analysis with insights from cultural studies, trauma theory, and postcolonial thought, Metaphors of Illness and Disability in Chinese American Literature argues that illness metaphors provide unique access to the struggles and strategies of Chinese North American communities.
Table of Contents
Part One - Speaking Bodies: Madness, Reproduction, and Gendered Pathology
1. Beyond Oppression and Resistance: Madness as Intercultural Epistemology
2. Fantasizing Maternal Infanticide: Negotiating Hybridity and Motherhood
3. Reproductive Failure: Infertility, Impotence, and Diasporic Masculinity
Part Two - Disciplined Bodies: Appetite, Memory, and Trauma
4. Disorderly Appetites: Anorexia and the Politics of Refusal
5. Enduring Aftershocks: Insomnia, Trauma, and the Journey of Recover
6. Forgetting to Remember: Amnesia, Memory, and Diasporic Survival
Part Three - Contagious Bodies: Stigma, History, and Apocalypse
7. Leprosy as Metaphor and the Reconstruction of Historical Memory in Geling Yan's The Epidemic of Pear Blossoms
8. Capitalist Chrononormativity and Temporal Refusal in the Chinese American Dystopian Novel Severance
Conclusion
Bibliography
Product details
| Published | Sep 03 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 9781666926873 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 10 tables |
| Dimensions | 229 x 152 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Related Titles
