Hungry for the Other: Consumption and Women's Empowerment in the Ghost Stories of J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Pu Songling

Hungry for the Other aims to locate the ghost stories of J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Pu Songling as part of a holistic vision, in which various narratives and disciplines may be read together in a different light. In my research and reading, I have focused on the topic of consumption, which led directly to considering the meanings of feeding bodies, especially gendered ones. The stories of Sheridan Le Fanu and Pu Songling allow us to reassess female characters and reimagine a different eating discourse in which women's consumption is a key measure of their agency and selfhood.;My comparative project furthers current work in supernatural world literature and transnational literary studies by exploring specifically the ways in which English and Chinese literature disclose and question the intersection of gender, class and race and shed light on women's agency and selfhood through various practices of eating. This project is indebted both to studies of comparative literature in the role of merging seemingly different works from two national tradition, and food and cultural studies, in which the progressive potential of engaging in notions of the self is made possible. Such an interdisciplinary approach to these stories illuminates profoundly meaningful power positions, for all cultures are deeply entwined with gender issues and all people need to eat to live.;This study examines four stories from Pu Songling's Strange Stories From a Leisure Studio (1740), two stories from Sheridan Le Fanu's collection In a Glass Darkly (1872), and one story from Le Fanu's Chronicles of Golden Friars (1871). My readings of these works are organized along three types of consumption: consumption of food, consumption in terms of literary and narrative possession, and consumption of commodities. These chapters are particularly interested in showing the relationship between gender and race through various types of food and notions of eating.;In the first chapter, I establish the historical contexts of Europe and China and their transnational connection during the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries. I explore the exchange of commodities during this time and people's responses to the foreign other as shown in literatures about these interchanges. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 include close readings of Le Fanu's and Pu's stories and demonstrate how women can gain agency through food and the control of consumption. In the concluding chapter, I consider contemporary eating practices and modern supernatural monsters.;At the heart of consumption, beyond biological needs, is the relationship between the self and others. Eating is sharing, eating is domineering, eating is liberating, eating is connecting. Hungry for the Other questions and thus challenges notions of power and individual agency through consumption. Through looking at food and consumption in this study, we conclude with the notion that women are not inevitably oppressed by their relationships with food, but rather that these relationships can empower them. I hope this study sparks questions about past and present consumption, about East and West interactions, about women's agency, and about ghost stories.