A DREAM OF GLORY（FANHUA MENG）：A CHINESE PLAY BY WANG YUN

Wang Yun's A Dream of Glory (Fanhua meng) has emerged as the first ever full-length chuanqi play written by a woman dramatist, a unique text amidst the canonical works by male playwrights during the Ming and Qing dynasties such as Tang Xianzu's Peony Pavilion and Kong Shangren's Peach Blossom Fan. The story, autobiographical in nature, is about a young lady who bemoans the constraints imposed on her sex and relates how her hope for a career as a government official materializes in a dream through cross-gender change. Through her translation of and critical introduction to the play, Qingyun Wu resurrects a long-neglected voice and reveals the suppressed desires of a most unusual woman in eighteenth-century China.

Qingyun Wu is Professor of Chinese and Director of Chinese Studies Center at California State University, Los Angeles. Her major publications include Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias (a 1996 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book) and The Remote Country of Women (1995, a co-translated long novel by Bai Hua). Her research interests include literary translation, comparative utopian literature, and Chinese women's literature.