Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature write by . This book was released on 2017-04-18. Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The contributors to Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions draw attention to ‘wanton woman’ themes across time as they were portrayed in court history (McMahon), fiction (Stevenson), drama (Lam, Wu), and songs and ballads (Ôki, Epstein, McLaren). Looking back, the essays challenge us with views of sexual transgression that are more heterogeneous than modern popular focus on Pan Jinlian would suggest. Central among the many insights to be found is that despite gender performance in Chinese history being overwhelmingly determined by the needs of patriarchal authority, men and women in the late imperial period discovered diverse ways in which to reflect on how men constantly sought their own bearings in reference to women.
Women Shall Not Rule
Women Shall Not Rule - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Women Shall Not Rule write by Keith McMahon. This book was released on 2013-06-06. Women Shall Not Rule available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Chinese emperors guaranteed male successors by taking multiple wives, in some cases hundreds and even thousands. Women Shall Not Rule offers a fascinating history of imperial wives and concubines, especially in light of the greatest challenges to polygamous harmony—rivalry between women and their attempts to engage in politics. Besides ambitious empresses and concubines, these vivid stories of the imperial polygamous family are also populated with prolific emperors, wanton women, libertine men, cunning eunuchs, and bizarre cases of intrigue and scandal among rival wives. Keith McMahon, a leading expert on the history of gender in China, draws upon decades of research to describe the values and ideals of imperial polygamy and the ways in which it worked and did not work in real life. His rich sources are both historical and fictional, including poetic accounts and sensational stories told in pornographic detail. Displaying rare historical breadth, his lively and fascinating study will be invaluable as a comprehensive and authoritative resource for all readers interested in the domestic life of royal palaces across the world.
Heroines of Jiangyong
Heroines of Jiangyong - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Heroines of Jiangyong write by . This book was released on 2009. Heroines of Jiangyong available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Heroines of Jiangyong is the first English translation of a set of verse narratives recorded in the unique women's script (nushu) of rural Jiangyong County, Hunan, in southern China. This selection of Chinese folk literature provides a rare window into the everyday life of rural daughters, wives, and mothers, as they transmit valuable lessons about surviving in a patriarchal society that is often harsh and unforgiving. Featuring strong female protagonists, the ballads deal with moral issues, dangers women face outside the family home, and the difficulties of childbirth. The women's script, which represents units of sound in the local Chinese dialect, was discovered by scholars in the late twentieth century, creating a stir in China and abroad. This volume offers a full translation of all the longer ballads in women's script, providing an exceptional opportunity to observe which specific narratives appealed to rural women in traditional China. The translations are preceded by a brief introduction to women's script and its scholarship, and a discussion of each of the twelve selections.
The Martyrs and the Poets
The Martyrs and the Poets - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Martyrs and the Poets write by Bing Yan (Scholar on Chinese literature). This book was released on 2019. The Martyrs and the Poets available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Women have often been treated as marginal figures or powerless victims in historical accounts of late imperial China, although recent decades have seen a significant rewriting of women during this period. This dissertation, which focuses on the women martyrs and women writers of the Zha family of Tianjin, contributes to this more nuanced understanding of women and gender relations in late imperial China, while also shedding new light on Tianjin's cultural history. While both the cult of female chastity and the burgeoning of women writers have recently attracted considerable scholarly attention, the Zha family's intriguing cases complicate the perceptions on both of these phenomena. In 1644, seven women of the Zha family died in a group suicide to protect their chastity against potential threats. However, it was not until several decades later that the family began to heavily promote these women martyrs' posthumous reputation, culminating in a large collection of writings that was compiled in 1740, nearly a century after their martyrdom. The first half of the eighteenth century also saw the family nurture several women poets. This dissertation explores this large-scale but belated promotion of the Zha family's women martyrs; it also looks beyond the Jiangnan area--the predominant focus of most scholarly works on late imperial women writers--into the writing activities of the Zha family women. By doing so, I seek to illustrate the struggles to both celebrate and make sense of stories of chastity martyrs, the conflicting forces at play beneath women's literary practices in a part of China not particularly known for supporting women writers, the various roles played by women and ghosts of women in the rise of a wealthy merchant-turned-scholar family to cultural prominence in eighteenth century Tianjin, and finally, the literary scene in a fast-changing commercial city.
Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction
Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction write by Li Guo. This book was released on 2021-06-15. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Women’s tanci, or “plucking rhymes,” are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest. Women tanci authors’ redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals of heroism. They establish a realistic tenor in affirming feminine domestic authority, and open up spaces for discussions of “womanly becoming,” female exceptionalism, and shifting family power structures. The vernacular mode underlying these texts yields productive possibilities of gendered self-representations, bodily valences, and dynamic performances of sexual roles. The result is a vernacular discursive frame that enables women’s appropriation and refashioning of orthodox moral values as means of self-affirmation and self-realization. Validations of women’s political activism and loyalism to the nation attest to tanci as a premium vehicle for disseminating progressive social incentives to popular audiences. Women’s tanci marks early modern writers’ endeavors to carve out a space of feminine becoming, a discursive arena of feminine appropriation, reinvention, and boundary-crossings. In this light, women’s tanci portrays gendered mobility through depictions of a heroine’s voyages or social ascent, and entails a forward-moving historical progression toward a more autonomous and vested model of feminine subjectivity.
