Reviews for Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination: 1905-1948

The average rating for Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination: 1905-1948 based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-16 00:00:00 Jose �lvarez Ju�rez So much more than a collection of poetry! Every time I picked it up, I was in awe of the amount of work that went into it - collecting and verifying the poems, transcribing, transliterating, and translating - and then there's the narrative! Bailey has provided the background information on bedouin culture, history, and language that provide readers with the insight they need to understand and appreciate the poems and some foundational knowledge to help them understand the bedouin's previous way of desert life. It is a book that I will come back to often, especially to read the poems in Arabic (what I can of them, anyway). I found the poems in the chapter "Poems to Entertain", well, the most entertaining! I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about the traditional Sinai bedouin culture.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-05-08 00:00:00 Mark Porter This is really more than just a book of poetry. I see a lot of people posting derogatory comments about Arabs and their culture, and, given that the Bedouin are predominately an illiterate, itinerant culture, they are not in a strong position to defend themselves. Such a lifestyle does not lend itself well to the arts generally such as painting, calligraphy, or sculpture; however, the spoken word is a perfect medium for such a race, and all that creativity is, instead, channeled into one medium --- poetry. As this book shows, the Bedouin are immensely rich, creative, clever, innovative poets. It goes beyond art --- it relates how they view the world, how they see each other, their history, their values. In my year long study of Arab Bedouin culture, this was a fine book to close things out ---- a feast for the eyes and the ears, and an appreciation that, while not all our cultures are the same, some excellence and beauty can be found in nearly all of them by the open mind and the curious eye.