Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China

Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China PDF Author: Nanxiu Qian
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804794278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
In 1898, Qing dynasty emperor Guangxu ordered a series of reforms to correct the political, economic, cultural, and educational weaknesses exposed by China's defeat by Japan in the First Sino-Japanese War. The "Hundred Day's Reform" has received a great deal of attention from historians who have focused on the well-known male historical actors, but until now the Qing women reformers have received almost no consideration. In this book, historian Nanxiu Qian reveals the contributions of the active, optimistic, and self-sufficient women reformers of the late Qing Dynasty. Qian examines the late Qing reforms from the perspective of Xue Shaohui, a leading woman writer who openly argued against male reformers' approach that subordinated women's issues to larger national concerns, instead prioritizing women's self-improvement over national empowerment. Drawing upon intellectual and spiritual resources from the freewheeling, xianyuan (worthy ladies) model of the Wei-Jin period of Chinese history (220–420) and the culture of women writers of late imperial China, and open to Western ideas and knowledge, Xue and the reform-minded members of her social and intellectual networks went beyond the inherited Confucian pattern in their quest for an ideal womanhood and an ideal social order. Demanding equal political and educational rights with men, women reformers challenged leading male reformers' purpose of achieving national "wealth and power," intending instead to unite women of all nations in an effort to create a just and harmonious new world.

Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China

Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China PDF Author: Nanxiu Qian
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804794278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book

Book Description
In 1898, Qing dynasty emperor Guangxu ordered a series of reforms to correct the political, economic, cultural, and educational weaknesses exposed by China's defeat by Japan in the First Sino-Japanese War. The "Hundred Day's Reform" has received a great deal of attention from historians who have focused on the well-known male historical actors, but until now the Qing women reformers have received almost no consideration. In this book, historian Nanxiu Qian reveals the contributions of the active, optimistic, and self-sufficient women reformers of the late Qing Dynasty. Qian examines the late Qing reforms from the perspective of Xue Shaohui, a leading woman writer who openly argued against male reformers' approach that subordinated women's issues to larger national concerns, instead prioritizing women's self-improvement over national empowerment. Drawing upon intellectual and spiritual resources from the freewheeling, xianyuan (worthy ladies) model of the Wei-Jin period of Chinese history (220–420) and the culture of women writers of late imperial China, and open to Western ideas and knowledge, Xue and the reform-minded members of her social and intellectual networks went beyond the inherited Confucian pattern in their quest for an ideal womanhood and an ideal social order. Demanding equal political and educational rights with men, women reformers challenged leading male reformers' purpose of achieving national "wealth and power," intending instead to unite women of all nations in an effort to create a just and harmonious new world.

Different Worlds of Discourse

Different Worlds of Discourse PDF Author: Nanxiu Qian
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004167765
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
During the late Qing reform era (1895-1912), 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 China's present and future. These debates found expression in new media, including periodicals and pictorials, which not only harnessed the power of existing cultural forms but also encouraged experimentation with a variety of new literary genres and styles - works increasingly produced by and for Chinese women. "Different Worlds of Discourse" explores the reform period from three interrelated and comparatively neglected perspectives: the construction of gender roles, the development of literary genres, and the emergence of new forms of print media.

Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period

Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period PDF Author: Rebecca E. Karl
Publisher: Harvard Univ Asia Center
ISBN: 9780674008540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Preliminary Material /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow --Introduction /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow --The Reform Movement, the Monarchy, and Political Modernity /Peter Zarrow --Literati-Journalists of the Chinese Progress (Shiwu bao) in Discord, 1896-1898 /Seungjoo Yoon --Zhang Zhidong's Proposal for Reform: A New Reading of the Quanxue pian /Tze-ki Hon --The Founding of the Imperial University and the Emergence of Ghinese Modernity /Timothy B. Weston --Placing the Hundred Days: Native-Place Ties and Urban Space /Richard Belsky --Reforming the Feminine: Female Literacy and the Legacy of 1898 /Joan Judge --Naming the First 'New Woman' /Hu Ying --'Slavery,' Citizenship, and Gender in Late Qing China's Global Context /Rebecca E. Karl --'Poetic Revolution,' Colonization, and Form at the Beginning of Modern Chinese Literature /Xiaobing Tang --Index /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow --Harvard East Asian Monographs /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow.

Women in Qing China

Women in Qing China PDF Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538166410
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
This groundbreaking work provides an original and deeply knowledgeable overview of Chinese women and gender relations during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912). Bret Hinsch explores in detail the central aspects of female life in this era, including family and marriage, motherhood, political power, work, inheritance, education, religious roles, and ethics. He considers not only women’s experiences but also their emotional lives and the ideals they pursued. Drawing on a wide range of Western, Japanese, and Chinese primary and secondary sources—including standard histories, poetry, prose literature, and epitaphs—Hinsch makes an important period of Chinese women’s history accessible to Western readers.

Beyond Tradition and Modernity

Beyond Tradition and Modernity PDF Author: Grace Fong
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047412966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Beyond Tradition and Modernity is a collection of original essays which considers the complexities behind the dramatic changes generated in China during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. As men and women literally-or metaphorically- crossed into new geographical worlds, they came to express their understanding of the expanding universe in a variety of ways which cannot be neatly labeled either traditional or modern. The contributors to this volume demonstrate how the creativity of these writers marked a new moment in historical and literary practices transcending this usual binary and simple teleology. Their essays expose how the ethnographic, literary, and educational projects of these men and women gave voice to new ideals and ideas that reflect the changing boundaries of gender at this time.

The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China

The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China PDF Author: Xiaorong Li
Publisher: Cambria Sinophone World
ISBN: 9781604979527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
An invaluable resource to scholars of literary and intellectual movements in late imperial and modern China, sexuality, gender, literary decadence, modernism, countercultures, and erotic literature, this book offers the first literary history on an important movement spanning the late Ming to the early Republican era.

New Modern Chinese Women and Gender Politics

New Modern Chinese Women and Gender Politics PDF Author: Chen Ya-chen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113502006X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The past century witnessed dramatic changes in the lives of modern Chinese women and gender politics. Whilst some revolutionary actions to rectify the feudalist patriarchy, such as foot-binding and polygyny were first seen in the late Qing period; the termination of the Qing Dynasty and establishment of Republican China in 1911-1912 initiated truly nation-wide constitutional reform alongside increasing gender egalitarianism. This book traces the radical changes in gender politics in China, and the way in which the lives, roles and status of Chinese women have been transformed over the last one hundred years. In doing so, it highlights three distinctive areas of development for modern Chinese women and gender politics: first, women’s equal rights, freedom, careers, and images about their modernized femininity; second, Chinese women’s overseas experiences and accomplishments; and third, advances in Chinese gender politics of non-heterosexuality and same-sex concerns. This book takes a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on film, history, literature, and personal experience. As such, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, women's studies, gender studies and gender politics.

Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China

Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China PDF Author: Xiaorong Li
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
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.

Women's Poetry and Poetics in Late Imperial China

Women's Poetry and Poetics in Late Imperial China PDF Author: Haihong Yang
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498537871
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
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 women’s poetic creations and existing male scholars' discourses and probes how these interactions generated innovative self-identities and renovations in poetic forms and aesthetics.

Herself an Author

Herself an Author PDF Author: Grace S. Fong
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824862821
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
"Grace Fong has written a wonderful history of female writers’ participation in the elite conventions of Chinese poetics. Fong’s recovery of many of these poets, her able exegesis and elegant, analytical grasp of what the poets were doing is a great read, and her bilingual presentation of their poetry gives the book additional power. This is a persuasive and elegant study." —Tani Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism "In this quietly authoritative book, Grace Fong has brought a group of women poets back to life. Previously ignored by scholars because of their marginal status or the inaccessibility of their works, these remarkable writers now speak to us about the sensualities, pains, satisfactions, and sadness of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Professor Fong—a superb translator of Chinese poetry, prose, and criticism—has rendered the works of these women in a way that is true both to our theoretical concerns and theirs." —Dorothy Ko, author of Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding "Professor Fong approaches the poetry of Ming-Qing upper-class women as a social-cultural activity that allowed these women to manifest their agency and assert their own subjectivity against the background of virtual and actual networks of fellow female poets. As the distillation of more than ten years of research by one of the leading scholars in this field, this work is a timely contribution that eminently deserves our attention. Given the inclusion of translations of some of the texts discussed, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to the reading of women’s poetry of the Ming-Qing period." —Wilt Idema, Harvard University Herself an Author addresses the critical question of how to approach the study of women’s writing. It explores various methods of engaging in a meaningful way with a rich corpus of poetry and prose written by women of the late Ming and Qing periods, much of it rediscovered by the author in rare book collections in China and the United States. The volume treats different genres of writing and includes translations of texts that are made available for the first time in English. Among the works considered are the life-long poetic record of Gan Lirou, the lyrical travel journal kept by Wang Fengxian, and the erotic poetry of the concubine Shen Cai. Taking the view that gentry women’s varied textual production was a form of cultural practice, Grace Fong examines women’s autobiographical poetry collections, travel writings, and critical discourse on the subject of women’s poetry, offering fresh insights on women’s intervention into the dominant male literary tradition. The wealth of texts translated and discussed here include fascinating documents written by concubines—women who occupied a subordinate position in the family and social system. Fong adopts the notion of agency as a theoretical focus to investigate forms of subjectivity and enactments of subject positions in the intersection between textual practice and social inscription. Her reading of the life and work of women writers reveals surprising instances and modes of self-empowerment within the gender constraints of Confucian orthodoxy. Fong argues that literate women in late imperial China used writing and reading to create literary and social communities, transcend temporal-spatial and social limitations, and represent themselves as the authors of their own life histories.