Tears from iron : cultural responses to famine in nineteenth-century China / Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley ; with a foreword by Cormac Ó Gráda.

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2008.

xxiii, 332 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Shanxi, greater China, and the famine -- Experiencing the famine : the hierarchy of suffering in a famine song from Xiezhou -- The wrath of heaven versus human greed -- Qing officialdom and the politics of famine -- Views from the outside : science, railroads, and laissez-faire economics -- Hybrid voices : the famine and Jiangnan activism -- Family and gender in famine -- The "feminization of famine" and the feminization of nationalism -- Eating culture : cannibalism and the semiotics of starvation, 1870-2001 -- Epilogue. New tears for new times : the famine revisited.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-317) and index.