mantic activities, many of which featured learned and text-based forms of prognostication, prescience, or ‘seeing’ (as in the art if a seer). Prescience, prediction, and prognostication are regularly depicted in both Chinese and cross-cultural work as the final step in divinatory processes. Prescience
Ellen Widmer
of differences concerns genre. The new novels are for the most part modernized versions of traditional-style vernacular novels, quite unlike the courtesan pieces. They follow the conventions of this type of fiction, with careful plotting, predictions and coinci- dences, and suspense at the ends of
Derek Hird
tisheng 素質提升), “cultural taste” ( wenhua pinwei 文化品味), and “children’s education” ( zinü jiaoyu 子女教育). 10 “[V]iewed as an economic and easily assimilable asset” in the West, 11 they appear to fulfil modernisation theory’s prediction that the non-Western world will develop along the lines of Western
mettle ( nü qiangren 女強人 ), giving an optimistic prediction of women’s status in the new millennium. The contributors to the two volumes are truly international. Among the eighteen essays, there are seven authors from the United States, one from Canada, three from Taiwan, two from the People’s Re- public
Eileen Cheng
behaviors and forms of social interaction, true to Wanlan’s prediction, winds up having deadly consequences. While the story presents the ills of arranged marriages and traditional women’s inability to transcend such an institution, it also shows how the pursuit of free love may be an even less viable