Women Writers Of Traditional China

The book also includes an extended section of criticism by and about women writers.

The book also includes an extended section of criticism by and about women writers.

This study of poetry by women in late imperial China examines the metamorphosis of the trope of the "inner chambers" (gui), to which women were confined in traditional Chinese households, and which in literature were both a real and an imaginary place. Originally popularized in sixth-century "palace style" poetry, the inner chambers were used by male writers as a setting in which to celebrate female beauty, to lament the loneliness of abandoned women, and by extension, to serve as a political allegory for the exile of loyal and upright male ministers spurned by the imperial court. Female writers of lyric poetry (ci) soon adopted the theme, beginning its transition from male fantasy to multidimensional representation of women and their place in society, and eventually its manifestation in other poetic genres as well. Emerging from the role of sexual objects within poetry, late imperial women were agents of literary change in their expansion and complication of the boudoir theme. While some take ownership and de-eroticizing its imagery for their own purposes, adding voices of children and older women, and filling the inner chambers with purposeful activity such as conversation, teaching, religious ritual, music, sewing, childcare, and chess-playing, some simply want to escape from their confinement and protest gender restrictions imposed on women. Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China traces this evolution across centuries, providing and analyzing examples of poetic themes, motifs, and imagery associated with the inner chambers, and demonstrating the complication and nuancing of the gui theme by increasingly aware and sophisticated women writers.

"The poetry proves again that stereotypes mislead. Chinese verse is supposedly cool and distant, detached and dispassionate. The opposite seems true; poets are exalted or downcast, drunk with wine or, in the case of women, frankly sensuous....Nothing stands still in this poetry: the wind blows the trees, the lake water ripples and the ever-present road runs in and out of the hills." --America

The past few years have seen a burgeoning effort to rethink questions of women, writing, and gender in modern China. Here 22 works of fiction, drama, autobiography, essays, and poetry, each prefaced by the author's photograph and a short biographical sketch, introduce women whose literary careers coincided with an era of tremendous social, political, and cultural turbulence. 18 illustrations.

The first book in English on women’s history in twentieth-century Manchuria, Resisting Manchukuo adds to a growing literature that challenges traditional understandings of Japanese colonialism. Norman Smith reveals the literary world of Japanese-occupied Manchuria (Manchukuo, 1932-45) and examines the lives, careers, and literary legacies of seven prolific Chinese women writers during the period. He shows how a complex blend of fear and freedom produced an environment in which Chinese women writers could articulate dissatisfaction with the overtly patriarchal and imperialist nature of the Japanese cultural agenda while working in close association with colonial institutions.

"One of the most exciting recent developments in the study of Chinese literature has been the rediscovery of an extremely rich and diverse tradition of women’s writing of the imperial period (221 B.C.E.–1911 C.E.). Many of these writings are of considerable literary quality. Others provide us with moving insights into the lives and feelings of a surprisingly diverse group of women living in Confucian China, a society that perhaps more than any other is known for its patriarchal tradition.Because of the burgeoning interest in the study of both premodern and modern women in China, several scholarly books, articles, and even anthologies of women’s poetry have been published in the last two decades. This anthology differs from previous works by offering a glimpse of women’s writings not only in poetry but in other genres as well, including essays and letters, drama, religious writing, and narrative fiction.The authors have presented the selections within their respective biographical and historical contexts. This comprehensive approach helps to clarify traditional Chinese ideas on the nature and function of literature as well as on the role of the woman writer."

Using a theoretical approach that utilizes work in literary studies, anthropology, feminist theory, and cultural studies, this book investigates how, in twentieth century China, the modern concepts of the new woman and the new writing developed into a protracted cultural debate over what and how women should and could write.

Until recently only a handful of women writers were thought to have existed in traditional China, but new scholarship has called attention to several hundred whose works have survived. Coming from the fields of literature, history, art history, and comparative literature, the fourteen contributors to this volume apply a range of methodologies to this new material and to other sources concerning women writers in China from 1600 to 1900. An opening section on courtesans details the lives of individual women and their male admirers--contemporary and subsequent--who imposed an array of meaning on the category of woman writer. The works treated in this section are mainly poetry, although drama also enters in. The second section focuses on the writings of gentrywomen who, confined to the inner quarters of their residences, turned out a body of poetry impressive both for its volume and for the number of authors involved. The third section takes up the issue of contextualization: how male writers situated women's poetry in their essays, stories, and travelogues. The fourth section pursues the same issue, but with reference to China's greatest work of fiction, Dream of the Red Chamber, first published in 1792, most of whose leading characters are talented gentrywomen. The volume concludes with a chapter by a specialist in comparative literature, who relates the concerns of the other chapters to literary and feminist studies outside the China field.

Chinese women's writing is rich and abundant, although not well known in the West. Despite the brutal wars and political upheavals that ravaged twentieth-century China, the ranks of women in the literary world increased dramatically. This anthology introduces English language readers to a comprehensive selection of Chinese women poets from both the mainland and Taiwan. It spans the early 1920s and the era of Republican China's literary renaissance through the end of the twentieth century. The collection includes 245 poems by forty poets in elegant English translations, as well as an extensive introduction that surveys the history of contemporary Chinese women's poetry. Brief biographical headnotes introduce each poet, from Bin Xin, China's preeminent woman poet in the early Republican period, to Rongzi, a leading poet of modern Taiwan. The selections are startling, moving, and wide-ranging in mood and tone. Together they present an enticing palette of delightful, elegant, playful, lyric, and tragic poetry.