Women’s poetry is a critical part of the contemporary Chinese literary landscape. Its impact and its diversity have attracted much attention in China and elsewhere. The Invention of a Discourse is the first book-length study that relates women poets to one another in terms of shared experience, subject matter, poetic technique and language. It also highlights interfaces with their international surroundings. The book diversifies and enriches current scholarship on Chinese and comparative literature from textual, intertextual and contextual perspectives.

The author presents case studies of works by prominent women poets from the 1980s and 1990s on five interrelated themes—the female body, the mirror, night, death and taking flight. Building on a framework drawn from literary theory and gender studies, she identifies textual evidence to demonstrate how contemporary Chinese women poets have invented a discourse of their own that involves the creative emulation of role models, most notably Sylvia Plath and Zhai Yongming. This book examines the ways in which Chinese women poets channel gender experience into creativity, and shows the role that individual poetics can play in determining the orientation of a national poetics.