2000/11/01 by Susan Mann · 14 citations
Social Sciences · Engineering · #Chinese history and philosophy #Asian Studies and History #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Mythology #Poetry #LOOM #Presidential address #Literature #History #Presidential system #Painting #Art #Aesthetics #Art history #Law #Political science #Politics #Engineering
paper · doi:10.2307/2659214
published in The Journal of Asian Studies 59(4), 835-862 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 2000/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Salman rushdie calls mythology “the family album or storehouse of a culture's childhood, containing [its] … future, codified as tales that are both poems and oracles” (1999, 83). Myths are, in his words, “the waking dreams our societies permit” that celebrate “the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks” (73). Of course, all societies have such waking dreams, but women as mythic figures loom rather larger in some cultures than in others. Chinese poets, painters, sculptors, librettists, essayists, commentators, philosophers, storytellers, puppeteers, illustrators, and historians made a veritable industry of myths of womanhood—an industry that, I shall argue today, far outstrips any of its counterparts elsewhere in Asia.