This is a timely and important study. Studies of Eileen Chang (1920–95), the distinguished Chinese author and essayist, are plentiful. An entire field of “Chang studies” currently exists in China, and Ang Lee's filmic adaptation of her short story, “Lust, Caution,” has inspired growing interest in her in the United States. However, much of this existing scholarship focuses on her Shanghai-based, Chinese-language writings from the 1930s and early 1940s. To be sure, her writings from this period are impressive and have rightly attracted the bulk of academic interest. However, Chang also had a second career as a bilingual and English-language author after she left China and moved to the United States in the early 1950s. Much of this later literature has been understudied or ignored. The purpose of this collection of essays is to fill this gap in knowledge.

The collection consists of an introduction, eleven essays, and an afterword. The twelve authors deploy a variety of methods, concepts, and theories to make sense of Chang's post-1950 writings. Her writings from this time are highly varied and erratic in form and so pose a significant challenge to interpretation. For example, some novels, like Little Reunion, rewrite parts of earlier stories that Chang wrote in the 1940s. Some stories are written in English, Chang's second language, and thus present a kind of act of “self-translation.” Finally, some of her post-1950 writings have been adapted by other artists, such as Ang Lee's film version of “Lust, Caution.” How do we interpret such a heterogeneous and incoherent body of work?

Several contributors to this volume, notably Shuang Shen, Xiaojue Wang, and David Wang, stress the importance of considering historical context when accounting for this incoherence. Chang's work, of course, straddles the Cold War era, and her own pre- and post-1950 “split” mirrors the splitting of China and Taiwan, and indeed of many other parts of the world at the time. I find this volume most successful when it links history and text in rethinking what has previously been viewed as Chang's post-1950 decline as an author. Rather than simply see her pre-1950 writings as superior, these authors usefully suggest that Chang's apparent post-1950 stylistic incoherence and rawness is itself an aesthetic function of the early Cold War period and thus significant. To explain the often baffling heterogenity and incoherence of Chang's post-1950 work, these authors introduce useful concepts, such as “self-translation” (Shuang Shen), “schizophrenia” (Xiaojue Wang), and “involution” (David Wang). For instance, David Wang provocatively describes Chang's post-1950 writing style, which incessantly invokes the past and refuses to think about the future, as an “involution” and thus as a challenge to the new forms of Chinese communist literature in the 1950s, which focused on forward-moving “revolution.”

Another productive set of essays are those by Jessica Tsui Yan Li, Gina Marchetti, and Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, who explore adaptations of Chang's work in the contemporary period, including Ang Lee's film. These essays are interesting for the way that they expose an inherent multitude of meanings or indeterminacy within Chang's texts of the postwar period, and for their analysis of the way that later authors, dramatists, and directors could appropriate these multiple significations for ends not entirely dissimilar to what Chang intended. For example, Chang, as is well known, also wrote film scripts, and these authors do a good job of using analyses of later film adaptations to reveal the latent cinematic dimensions of her writing. They argue that in Chang's earlier efforts to grapple with questions of colonialism and such, contemporary adaptors discern an opportunity to think through related issues in the present, such as Hong Kong culture in the 1990s. In particular, and perhaps counterintuitively, it is Chang's focus on form and style that makes this transhistorical bridge possible. It is this deep commitment to aesthetic form, shared by author and adaptor, that facilitates the translation of Chang's ostensibly idiosyncratic stories across time and genre.

As with any edited volume, the essays are of uneven quality. I found the essays most generative and compelling when they used Chang's extraordinary life history and singular set of texts to generate new concepts about the relationship between author and historical context, and new forms of textual critique. For example, I quite enjoyed Nicole Huang's deft reading of Chang's inimitable writings on fashion and objects, which melds “thing theory” and transnational critique into a configuration that felt totally fresh, not only for Chang studies or China studies, but literary studies in general.

I found this volume less interesting when authors simply applied conventional theoretical frameworks, such as psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, to Chang's writing. I would suggest, in fact, that the analytical trajectory should be reversed: rather than use Chang's work to illustrate old theories, scholars should use her most remarkable corpus of texts to articulate new theories and transform existing fields like psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies. In other words, Eileen Chang has given the growing field of Chinese cultural studies a rich opportunity to take the lead, rather than simply follow prevailing academic trends.