Leseprobe
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Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction
Li Guo
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Belletristik / Essays, Feuilleton, Literaturkritik, Interviews
Beschreibung
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.
Rezensionen
"From an intercultural, intersectional perspective, Li Guo delves into the construction of strategies utilized by female characters to advance their positions and authority, and outlines how mock marriages between women problematize ‘the sexual contract under polygamy.' This well-researched work focuses on five worthy but understudied <i>tanci</i> narratives that will resonate with global audiences. Building on the author's earlier writings about the genre, <i>Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's</i> Tanci <i>Fiction</i> significantly advances the field of vernacular Chinese literature, Chinese women's literature, and <i>tanci</i> studies to new and welcome levels."
" <i>Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's</i> Tanci <i>Fiction</i> takes the reader on an absorbing journey through five < i>tancinovels compiled in the course of China's war-ridden nineteenth century—two of which are presented here for the first time in English. Li Guo provides a compelling treatment of the multifarious valence and seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity with which these <i>tanci</i> authors deploy the archetypal motif of female cross-dressing (with all the complicated gender reversals, sociofamilial reconfigurations, and homoerotic scenarios it induces), the capacious reinvention of modes of female exemplarity, and the authorial articulations of the suffering and loss caused by the civil war."
"Building on her seminal first book and focusing on five understudied nineteenth-century <i>tanci</i>, Guo takes readers deep into the imaginary social space that women <i>tanci</i> writers created. She skillfully guides readers though elaborate plots with theoretical insight and broad contextualization, showing along the way the complex interplays of Confucian gender virtues and norms, and changing ideas about female talent, desire, and aspiration. Filled with stimulating analysis, the book is a significant addition to the scholarship on early modern gender studies in China and beyond."
Kundenbewertungen
feminine narrative tradition, social unrest, protofeminist, Taiping Rebellion, female autonomy, Asian, China, Confucian, female exceptionalism, social mobility, women’s political activism, protofeminism