Table of contents : Front Matter Contents Introduction Part I Texts, Tutors, and Fathers The Making of the Everyday World Women as Emblems of Dynastic Fall in Qing Literature The Return of the Palace Lady The Daughter's Vision of National Crisis Part II Ethics of Form Jinghua yuan Part III The Coin of Gender in Pinhua baojian The Fall of the God of Money The Newspaper, zhiguai, and the Sorcery Epidemic of 1876 A New Mode of Literary Production in the Late Qing The Narrator's Voice Before the "Fiction Revolution" Part IV Creating Subjectivity in Wu Jianren's The Sea of Regret The Subject of Pain Women's Poetic Witnessing Conclusions Second Haunting Index