Heroines Of The Qing

Heroines of the Qing introduces an array of Chinese women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were powerful, active subjects of their own lives and who wrote themselves as the heroines of their exemplary stories. Traditionally, “exemplary women” (lienu)—heroic martyrs, chaste widows, and faithful maidens, for example—were written into official dynastic histories for their unrelenting adherence to female virtue by Confucian family standards. However, despite the rich writing traditions about these women, their lives were often distorted by moral and cultural agendas. Binbin Yang, drawing on interdisciplinary sources, shows how they were able to cross boundaries that were typically closed to women—boundaries not only of gender, but also of knowledge, economic power, political engagement, and ritual and cultural authority. Yang closely examines the rhetorical strategies these “exemplary women” exploited for self-representation in various writing genres and highlights their skillful negotiation with, and appropriation of, the values of female exemplarity for self-empowerment.

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.

At the end of the Qing dynasty, works of fiction by male authors placed women in new roles. Fiction’s Family delves into the writings of one literary family from western Zhejiang whose works were emblematic of shifting attitudes toward women. The mother, Wang Qingdi, and the father, Zhan Sizeng, published their poems during the second half of the nineteenth century. Two of their four sons, Zhan Xi and Zhan Kai, wrote novels that promoted reforms in women’s lives. This book explores the intergenerational link, as well as relations between the sons, to find out how the conflicts faced by the parents may have been refigured in the novels of their sons. Its central question is about the brothers’ reformist attitudes. Were they based on the pronouncements of political leaders? Were they the result of trends in Shanghai publishing? Or did they derive from Wang Qingdi’s disappointment in her “companionate marriage,” as manifested in her poems? By placing one family at the center of this study, Ellen Widmer illuminates the diachronic bridge between the late Qing and the period just before it, the synchronic interplay of genres during the brothers’ lifetimes, and the interaction of Shanghai publishing with regions outside Shanghai.

Men and Women in Qing China is an analysis of Chinese prescriptions of gender as represented in Cao Xueqin's famous eighteenth century Chinese novel of manners, The Red Chamber Dream or The Story of the Stone. Drawing on feminist literary critical methods it examines Qing notions of masculinity and femininity, including themes such as bisexuality, motherhood, virginity and purity, and gender and power. Its central aim is to challenge the common assumption that the novel represents some form of early Chinese feminism by examining the text in conjunction with historical data. The book will be especially important to those interested in issues of gender in China, the history of Chinese literary criticism and the application of feminist theory to the Asian text.

Drawing on a library of newly digitized resources, this volume's eleven chapters describe, analyze, and theorize the enormous literary output of women writers of the Ming and Qing periods (1368-1911) that have only recently been rediscovered.

The first biographical dictionary in any Western language devoted solely to Chinese women, this reference is the product of years of research, translation, and writing by a team of over 60 China scholars from around the world. Compiled from a wide array of original sources, these detailed biographies present the lives, work, and significance of more than 200 Chinese women from many different backgrounds and areas of interest.

This new volume of the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women spans more than 2,000 years from antiquity to the early seventh century. It recovers the stories of more than 200 women, nearly all of them unknown in the West. The contributors have sifted carefully through the available sources, from the oracle bones to the earliest legends, from Liu Xiang's didactic Biographies to official and unofficial histories, for glimpses and insights into the lives of women.

This book brings together some of the worlds finest "meiren hua" (paintings of beautiful women), a genre of Chinese painting spanning the countrys last imperial dynasty (1644-1912). Often dismissed as decorative or misinterpreted as highbrow portraits of ladies, these enigmatic and relatively unexamined works are the subject of close scholarly scrutiny in this publication.