Kay Schaffer is an Adjunct Professor in Gender Studies and Social Analysis at the University of Adelaide, Australia.Xianlin Song is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Asian Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

• 1. Introduction: Women Writers in Postsocialist China 2. Translations of the Self: Hong Ying's Daughter of the River and Summer of Betrayal 3. Narrative, Trauma and Memory: Chen Ran's A Private Life 4. Silence and the Silenced – Literary Renderings of Rural Women's Lives in and Beyond China: Lin Bai's Record of Women's Chatting, Sheng Keyi's Northern Girls, and Xinran's Transnational Interventions 5. 'Beauty Writers', Consumer Culture, and Global China: Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby, Mian Mian's Candy, and the Internet Generation 6. Revisiting the Twentieth Century: Zhang Yihe's Historical Memoirs and Chen Danyan's Shanghai Trilogy 7. Reconstructing the Past: Zhao Mei's Biography of Tang Dynasty Emperor, Woman: Wu Zetian 8. Epic Re-Visionings: Xu Xiaobin's Fabulist Tale, Feathered Serpent 9. Conclusion: New Desires, New Identities: Reorienting Literary and Gender Relations in and Beyond China

"This book is no doubt a timely and important study of the post-socialist cultural landscape through the lens of women writers. (…) the major achievement of the book is its ability to observe the shift from how writers of the 1980s had to have "a lofty educative object and to conform to the ideological concerns of the government"to how post-socialist female writers have successfully removed themselves from these shackles." - Leung Wing-fai, King’s College London