Women Poets and Authors in Late Imperial China
- LAST REVIEWED: 26 May 2023
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 May 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920082-0209
- LAST REVIEWED: 26 May 2023
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 May 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920082-0209
Introduction
One of the most exciting developments in the study of Chinese literature in late twentieth century has been the rediscovery of an extremely rich and diverse tradition of women’s writing of the imperial period (221 BCE–1911 CE). Only recently has the enormous literary output of women writers of the Ming and Qing periods (1368–1911) been rediscovered. That women’s writing in traditional China has needed to be rediscovered is caused by two problems. The first lies in its controversial nature: although women found a great venue in writing, poetry especially, to communicate their inner feelings and thoughts, publishing and leaving their writings to later generations did violate the Confucian gender demarcation that confined their voices to within the domestic domain. The second reflected their marginalization by late Qing reformists and the New Culture Movement. Proponents of both views stubbornly adhered to a rigid scheme of historical evolution, and designated late imperial women as oppressed or silenced, thus neglecting and/or suppressing women’s writing. The late imperial period alone left more than four thousand collections of women’s literary works. Together they 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. Many of these writings are of considerable literary quality. These poets include imperial ladies, gentry women, courtesans, Buddhist and Daoist nuns, as well as commoners such as farm wives. Some women wrote out of isolation and despair, finding in words a mastery that otherwise eluded them. Others were recruited into poetry by family members, friends, or sympathetic male advocates. Some dwelt on intimate family matters and cast their poems as addresses to husbands and sons at large in the wide world of men’s affairs. Each woman had her own reasons for writing poetry and her own ways of appropriating, and often changing, the conventions of both men’s and women’s verse. The primary purpose of this article is to put before the English-speaking reader evidence of the poetic talent that flourished, against all odds, among women in premodern China. It is also designed to spur reflection among specialists in Chinese poetry, inspiring new perspectives on both the Chinese poetic tradition and the canon of female poets within that tradition. The history of women writers in late Imperial China both connects with and departs from the established patterns for women’s writing in the West, thus complementing current discussions of “feminine writing.” This article looks into this grand matter in four sections, namely: General Overviews, Primary Sources on Women Authors, Studies of Women Authors, and Studies on Women and Gender as Historical Background. This bibliographical entry tries to provide in-depth perspectives into the study of late imperial Chinese women poets and authors through recent scholarship.
General Overviews
The earliest modern Chinese writing of “the history of Chinese women’s literature” appeared in the early Republic of China, represented by Xie 1916, Liang 1927, and Tan 1930. Xie continued traditional views on literature, separated from Tan and Liang by the May-Fourth literary debate. Although all three share the common goal of affirming gender equality and supporting women’s liberation, they are different in the specific connotation and implementation path of gender equality, corresponding to their academic generations. Furth and Lee 1992 provides the first Anglophone scholarship that called academia’s attention to the previously ignored rich resources of the writings by late imperial Chinese women. This special issue of the journal Late Imperial China samples how to approach these materials and showcases a collaboration of historians and literary scholars that has led to further interdisciplinary study in this field. Two book-length studies, Ko 1994 and Mann 1997, appeared soon afterwards, both by historians drawing upon women’s poetic works for their reconstruction and reconceptualization of Chinese historiography from the perspectives of women and gender. Ko 1994 challenges the May-Fourth paradigm that designated late imperial women as oppressed or silenced, arguing that, as writers, readers, editors, and teachers, these women created a rich culture and meaningful existence from within the constraints of the male-dominated Confucian system. Mann 1997 places women at the center of the High Qing era and shows how gender relations shaped the economic, political, social, and cultural changes of the age. Widmer and Chang 1997 expands the study from previously a handful of known women writers to several hundred rediscovered works by women. The authors not only enlarged the range of study but also enriched methodologies and approaches. The volume concludes with a chapter that relates the concerns of the other chapters to literary and feminist studies outside the China field. These four works led to a plethora of further studies. Idema and Grant 2004 explores Chinese women’s writings throughout the imperial period by translating selected texts in poetry, essays, letters, drama, religious writing, and narrative fiction, presenting them within their respective biographical and historical contexts and classifying them by themes. Fong and Widmer 2010 and Berg 2013 focus on women’s literary output, the former of the Ming and Qing periods (1368–1911), and the latter of the late Ming to the early Qing (1580–1700). They open up new critical space in Chinese literary history and offer new perspectives on China’s culture and society. Li 2014 demonstrates the Ming-Qing dynastic transition as an epochal event that reverberated in Qing writings and beyond; political disorder was bound up with vibrant literary and cultural production. Qian, et al. 2008 studies previously ignored roles of women in China’s reform era (1895–1912) when, for the first time in Chinese history, they emerged in public space in collective groups and demanded equal political and educational rights with men through both conventional and new literary genres published in news media.
Berg, Daria. Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580–1700. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.
The sixteenth century brought rapid developments in technology, commerce, and the publishing industry that saw women emerging in new roles as both consumers and producers of culture, providing rich detail of exceptionally fine, interesting, and engaging literary works. This book opens fascinating new windows on to the lives, dreams, nightmares, anxieties, and desires of the authors and the world out of which they emerged.
Fong, Grace S., and Ellen Widmer, eds. The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming through Qing. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010.
This volume analyzes and theorizes the rediscovered literary output of Ming and Qing women writers that reflects the complexity of women’s experiences in the inner quarters and their varied responses to challenges facing state and society. Taking a truly interdisciplinary approach, it rewrites Chinese literary history and ends up illuminating the centrality of writing women to the social, political, and intellectual life of late imperial China.
Furth, Charlotte, and James Lee, eds. Special Issue: Symposium on Poetry and Women’s Culture in Late Imperial China. Late Imperial China 13.1 (1992).
This special issue resulted from a meeting that brought together, for the first time in the Anglophone scholarly community, feminist researchers who explored writings by women poets and scholars working on women and gender issues in late imperial China. The collaboration of historians and literary scholars makes it possible to hear the literary “voices” of these women, and so to explore their intellectual and social worlds in new depth.
Idema, Wilt, and Beata Grant. The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004.
DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1tg5kw2
This anthology offers a glimpse of women’s writings throughout China’s imperial period (first century to 1911) by translating selected texts in poetry and other genres. The authors have presented the selections within their biographical and historical contexts and classified them by themes. 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.
Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.
This pathbreaking work argues that literate women in 17th-century Jiangnan (South of the Yangzi River) were far from oppressed or silenced. As writers, readers, editors, and teachers, these women created a rich culture and meaningful existence from within the constraints of the male-dominated Confucian system, brought together by their shared love of poetry and common concerns as women through three types of women’s communities, domestic, social, and public.
Li, Wai-yee. Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014.
This book focuses on the discursive and imaginative space commanded by women during the Ming-Qing transition. Women and men wrote in a feminine voice or turned women into a signifier to convey their lamentation, nostalgia, or moral questions for the fallen dynasty. This multivalent presence of women provides a window into the emotional and psychological turmoil of the Ming-Qing transition and of subsequent moments of national trauma.
Liang Yizhen 梁乙真. Qingdai funü wenxue shi (清代婦女文學史). Shanghai: Zhonghua Shuju, 1927.
Liang, like Xie, focuses on mainstream genres of women’s works from the Ming-Qing transition to the late Qing, paying special attention to their substantial influence on the history of literature. He discusses the Qing inheritance of Ming women’s writing styles, and the causes of the growth and decline of women’s literature in the Qing. He also introduces the major Qing women’s poetry clubs and their close association with leading male literati of the time.
Mann, Susan. Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Drawing on one of the first anthologies of women’s poetry compiled by a woman, this first book-length study of gender relations in the Lower Yangzi region during the High Qing era (c. 1683–1839) examines not only literary sensibilities and intimate emotions, but also political judgments, moral values, and social relations. It thereupon challenges enduring late-19th-century perspectives that emphasized the oppression and subjugation of Chinese women.
Qian, Nanxiu, Grace S. Fong, and Richard J. Smith, eds. Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2008.
During the late Qing reform era, women for the first time in Chinese history emerged in public space in collective groups. They assumed new social and educational roles and engaged in intense debates about the place of women in the present and the future. These debates found expression in new media, which encouraged experimentation with a variety of new literary genres and styles—works increasingly produced by and for Chinese women.
Tan Zhengbi 譚正璧. Zhongguo nüxing de wenxue shenghuo (中國女性的文學生活). Shanghai: Guangming Shuju, 1930.
Tan’s book on the literary life of Chinese women prefers a May-Fourth approach to promote popular literature such as tanci or lyric storytelling, novels, vernacular and erotic literature.
Widmer, Ellen, and Kang-i Sun Chang, eds. Writing Women in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
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.
Xie Wuliang 謝無量. Zhongguo funü wenxue shi (中國婦女文學史). Shanghai: Zhonghua Shuju, 1916.
Xie systematically writes on the history of Chinese women’s literature from China’s antiquity to the Ming, focusing on traditionally mainstream genres such as poetry, prose, ci-lyric, and fu-rhyme prose, as well as letters, prefaces, epitaphs, and inscriptions. He cites representative works of each period and genre, attached with his insightful comments, and thus presents the evolution of Chinese women’s literature and confirms its indispensable position in the history of Chinese literature.
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login.
How to Subscribe
Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here.
Article
- 1989 People's Movement
- Aesthetics
- Agricultural Technologies and Soil Sciences
- Agriculture, Origins of
- Ancestor Worship
- Anti-Japanese War
- Architecture, Chinese
- Assertive Nationalism and China's Core Interests
- Astronomy under Mongol Rule
- Book Publishing and Printing Technologies in Premodern Chi...
- Buddhism
- Buddhist Monasticism
- Buddhist Poetry of China
- Budgets and Government Revenues
- Calligraphy
- Central-Local Relations
- Ceramics
- Chiang Kai-shek
- Children’s Culture and Social Studies
- China and Africa
- China and Peacekeeping
- China and the World, 1900-1949
- China's Agricultural Regions
- China’s Soft Power
- China’s West
- Chinese Alchemy
- Chinese Communist Party Since 1949, The
- Chinese Communist Party to 1949, The
- Chinese Diaspora, The
- Chinese Nationalism
- Chinese Script, The
- Christianity in China
- Civil Society in China
- Classical Confucianism
- Collective Agriculture
- Concepts of Authentication in Premodern China
- Confucius
- Confucius Institutes
- Consumer Society
- Contemporary Chinese Art Since 1976
- Corruption
- Criticism, Traditional
- Cross-Strait Relations
- Cultural Revolution
- Daoism
- Daoist Canon
- Deng Xiaoping
- Dialect Groups of the Chinese Language
- Disability Studies
- Drama (Xiqu 戏曲) Performance Arts, Traditional Chinese
- Dream of the Red Chamber
- Early Imperial China
- Economic Reforms, 1978-Present
- Economy, 1895-1949
- Emergence of Modern Banks
- Energy Economics and Climate Change
- Environmental Issues in Contemporary China
- Environmental Issues in Pre-Modern China
- Establishment Intellectuals
- Ethnicity and Minority Nationalities Since 1949
- Ethnicity and the Han
- Examination System, The
- Fall of the Qing, 1840-1912, The
- Falun Gong, The
- Family Relations in Contemporary China
- Fiction and Prose, Modern Chinese
- Film, Chinese Language
- Film in Taiwan
- Financial Sector, The
- Five Classics
- Folk Religion in Contemporary China
- Folklore and Popular Culture
- Foreign Direct Investment in China
- Gardens
- Gender and Work in Contemporary China
- Gender Issues in Traditional China
- Great Leap Forward and the Famine, The
- Guanxi
- Guomindang (1912–1949)
- Han Expansion to the South
- Health Care System, The
- Heritage Management
- Heterodox Sects in Premodern China
- Historical Archaeology (Qin and Han)
- Hukou (Household Registration) System, The
- Human Origins in China
- Human Resource Management in China
- Human Rights in China
- Imperialism and China, c. 1800–1949
- Industrialism and Innovation in Republican China
- Innovation Policy in China
- Intellectual Trends in Late Imperial China
- Islam in China
- Jesuit Missions in China, from Matteo Ricci to the Restora...
- Journalism and the Press
- Judaism in China
- Labor and Labor Relations
- Landscape Painting
- Language, The Ancient Chinese
- Language Variation in China
- Late Imperial Economy, 960–1895
- Late Maoist Economic Policies
- Law in Late Imperial China
- Law, Traditional Chinese
- Legalism
- Li Bai and Du Fu
- Liang Qichao
- Literati Culture
- Literature Post-Mao, Chinese
- Literature, Pre-Ming Narrative
- Liu, Zongzhou
- Local Elites in Ming-Qing China
- Local Elites in Song-Yuan China
- Lu, Xun
- Macroregions
- Management Style in "Chinese Capitalism"
- Manchukuo
- Mao Zedong
- Marketing System in Pre-Modern China, The
- Marxist Thought in China
- Material Culture
- May Fourth Movement
- Media Representation of Contemporary China, International
- Medicine, Traditional Chinese
- Medieval Economic Revolution
- Mencius
- Middle-Period China
- Migration Under Economic Reform
- Ming and Qing Drama
- Ming Dynasty
- Ming Poetry 1368–1521: Era of Archaism
- Ming Poetry 1522–1644: New Literary Traditions
- Ming-Qing Fiction
- Modern Chinese Drama
- Modern Chinese Poetry
- Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literature
- Mohism
- Museums
- Music in China
- Needham Question, The
- Neo-Confucianism
- Neolithic Cultures in China
- New Social Classes, 1895–1949
- One Country, Two Systems
- One-Child Policy, The
- Opium Trade
- Orientalism, China and
- Palace Architecture in Premodern China (Ming-Qing)
- Paleography
- People’s Liberation Army (PLA), The
- Philology and Science in Imperial China
- Poetics, Chinese-Western Comparative
- Poetry, Early Medieval
- Poetry, Traditional Chinese
- Political Art and Posters
- Political Dissent
- Political Thought, Modern Chinese
- Polo, Marco
- Popular Music in the Sinophone World
- Population Dynamics in Pre-Modern China
- Population Structure and Dynamics since 1949
- Porcelain Production
- Post-Collective Agriculture
- Poverty and Living Standards since 1949
- Printing and Book Culture
- Prose, Traditional
- Qi Baishi
- Qing Dynasty up to 1840
- Regional and Global Security, China and
- Religion, Ancient Chinese
- Renminbi, The
- Republican China, 1911-1949
- Revolutionary Literature under Mao
- Rural Society in Contemporary China
- School of Names
- Shanghai
- Silk Roads, The
- Sino-Hellenic Studies, Comparative Studies of Early China ...
- Sino-Japanese Relations Since 1945
- Sino-Soviet Relations, 1949–1991
- Social Welfare in China
- Sociolinguistic Aspects of the Chinese Language
- Su Shi (Su Dongpo)
- Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution
- Taiping Civil War
- Taiwanese Democracy
- Taiwan's Miracle Development: Its Economy over a Century
- Technology Transfer in China
- Television, Chinese
- Terracotta Warriors, The
- Tertiary Education in Contemporary China
- Texts in Pre-Modern East and South-East Asia, Chinese
- The Economy, 1949–1978
- The Shijing詩經 (Classic of Poetry; Book of Odes)
- Township and Village Enterprises
- Traditional Historiography
- Transnational Chinese Cinemas
- Tribute System, The
- Unequal Treaties and the Treaty Ports, The
- United States-China Relations, 1949-present
- Urban Change and Modernity
- Uyghurs
- Vernacular Language Movement
- Village Society in the Early Twentieth Century
- Warlords, The
- Water Management
- Women Poets and Authors in Late Imperial China
- Xi, Jinping
- Xunzi
- Yan'an and the Revolutionary Base Areas
- Yuan Dynasty
- Yuan Dynasty Poetry
- Zhu Xi