Can Xue (pen name of Deng Xiaohua) is a Chinese writer and literary critic whose work has gained a following for its avant-garde themes and style. Resisting compartmentalization as a feminist writer, or interpretations of her often nightmarish tales as straightforward literary responses to the violence and political excesses of the Mao period, Can Xue imperatively denied that her work is rooted in China’s socio-historic condition. ‘There is no political cause in my work’, she said in an interview in 2002, maintaining instead that hers is a ‘literature of the soul’ and that its main interest lies in the metaphysical aspect of individual existence.