Women's Poetry and Poetics in Late Imperial China: A Dialogic Engagement

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This literary study examines women-authored poetry and poetic criticism in late imperial China. It provides close readings of original texts to explore the poetic forms and devices women poets employed, to place their work into the context of the wider literary history of the period, and to analyze how they asserted their own agency to negotiate their literary, social, and political concerns. The author also investigates the interactions between womens poetic creations and existing male scholars' discourses and probes how these interactions generated innovative self-identities and renovations in poetic forms and aesthetics.

Reviews

Haihong Yangs study presents a major addition to the growing body of scholarship on late imperial Chinese womens literature by looking into the various strategies used by these women authors to create a tradition of their own. Topics discussed include attempts at devising a female poetics, the repositioning of male tropes like the recluse in a female context, the use of poems written in jest to make controversial claims, and the innovative use of allusions. The monograph concludes with a chapter devoted to poems written by women in celebration of the changes in womens education in the final decades of the Qing dynasty. In each chapter a general introduction precedes a more detailed case study. It has to be considered a strength of this volume that each chapter tantalizingly leaves the reader wishing for a more comprehensive treatment of its theme. -- Wilt L. Idema, Harvard University
This study is commendable for its groundbreaking analytical approach, which draws inspiration from both traditional Chinese intuitive criticism and Western cultural theory. Haihong Yang has asked great questions about Chinese women poets, making this book both engaging and thought provoking. -- Kang-I Sun Chang, Yale University
This new and long-awaited study provides an in-depth examination of womens poetic contribution to classical Chinese literature. It focuses on women writers participation in the construction of literary conventions through reassessing their poetic creations and interactions with their predecessors and contemporaries, and by remapping their relations with, and positions within, the male canons of late imperial China. The author aptly genders conventional poetic techniques, topics, and sub-genres to nuance their performances in womens poetry, showing womens courageous renovation of male poetics and their inventiveness in nurturing a counterpart of their own. This book enriches our understanding of womens accomplishments yet to be fully explored in classical Chinese literature. -- Nanxiu Qian, Rice University
This engaging monograph on womens poetic practice in late imperial China provides fresh insights into historical womens gendered intervention into the mainstream literary tradition. Through astute analysis of exemplary works, Haihong Yang skillfully shows how women succeeded in appropriating a long-established poetic language to make their writing a new and vital part of Chinas literary legacy well-deserving of recognition. -- Grace S. Fong, McGill University

Author Bio

Haihong Yang is assistant professor of Chinese in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Delaware.