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 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

Get Book Here

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.

Writing Women in Late Imperial China

Writing Women in Late Imperial China PDF Author: Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies and Professor of East Asian Studies Ellen Widmer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804728713
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Scholars from the fields of literature, history, and art history apply a range of methodologies to newly discovered works by women writers and to other sources concerning women writers in China from 1600 to 1900.

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 : 393

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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.

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.

Photo Poetics

Photo Poetics PDF Author: Shengqing Wu
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549717
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 650

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Book Description
Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world? Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.

How to Read Chinese Poetry

How to Read Chinese Poetry PDF Author: Zong-qi Cai
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231139411
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
In this "guided" anthology, experts lead students through the major genres and eras of Chinese poetry from antiquity to the modern time. The volume is divided into 6 chronological sections and features more than 140 examples of the best shi, sao, fu, ci, and qu poems. A comprehensive introduction and extensive thematic table of contents highlight the thematic, formal, and prosodic features of Chinese poetry, and each chapter is written by a scholar who specializes in a particular period or genre. Poems are presented in Chinese and English and are accompanied by a tone-marked romanized version, an explanation of Chinese linguistic and poetic conventions, and recommended reading strategies. Sound recordings of the poems are available online free of charge. These unique features facilitate an intense engagement with Chinese poetical texts and help the reader derive aesthetic pleasure and insight from these works as one could from the original. The companion volume How to Read Chinese Poetry Workbook presents 100 famous poems (56 are new selections) in Chinese, English, and romanization, accompanied by prose translation, textual notes, commentaries, and recordings. Contributors: Robert Ashmore (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Zong-qi Cai; Charles Egan (San Francisco State); Ronald Egan (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara); Grace Fong (McGill); David R. Knechtges (Univ. of Washington); Xinda Lian (Denison); Shuen-fu Lin (Univ. of Michigan); William H. Nienhauser Jr. (Univ. of Wisconsin); Maija Bell Samei; Jui-lung Su (National Univ. of Singapore); Wendy Swartz (Columbia); Xiaofei Tian (Harvard); Paula Varsano (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Fusheng Wu (Univ. of Utah)

New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry PDF Author: C. Lupke
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230610145
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book brings together fresh research from experts on contemporary Chinese poetry, built upon one of the most glorious poetic traditions of any civilization in the world yet historically neglected by scholars in English. This comprehensive volume offers readable and provocative treatments of many of the most important Chinese poets of our age.

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.

Because a Woman's Heart is Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean

Because a Woman's Heart is Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean PDF Author: Sugar Magnolia Wilson
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 1776710312
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Book Description
This is a first collection from a significant new voice in New Zealand poetry. Through fun and gore, love and monsters, Sugar Magnolia Wilson's riveting first collection takes readers inside a world where past and present, fiction and fact, author and subject collide. Playful and yet not so sunny, these poems invite you in with extravagant and surprising imagery, only to reveal the uneasy, Frankenstein world within.