Heroines of the Qing: Exemplary Women Tell Their Stories

by Binbin Yang

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295995496
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	04/01/2016
Series:	Modern Language Initiative Books Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Binbin Yang is assistant professor of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Note to Readers xiii

Introduction 3

1 Breaking the Silence: Cases of Outspoken Exemplary Women 16

2 Visualizing Exemplarity: Women's Portraits and Painting for Self-Representation 39

3 Staging Family Drama: Genealogical Writing as Ritual Authority 87

4 Enacting Guardians of Family Health: From Exemplary Wife to Reformer 117

Conclusion 155

Chinese Character Glossary 161

Notes 171

Bibliography 205

Index 223

What People are Saying About This

Dorothy Ko

"A daring, path-opening book. The integration of narration and analysis makes the book accessible to the lay reader while speaking to specialists in history and literature."

Grace Fong

"Binbin Yang’s pathbreaking study of Qing women writers’ self-empowerment as female exemplars takes the field of women’s culture in late imperial China to a whole new level. In addition to exploring women’s previously well-known talent in poetry, Yang engages with a diverse range of texts by women in unexpected genres – such as genealogy writing, medical treatises, and inscriptions to autobiographical paintings – to reveal the lived realities of these writing heroines. A stunning achievement."

Xiaorong Li

"This is the first book to examine exemplary women’s own accounts of their lives, moving from biographical to autobiographical accounts. Heroines of the Qing is original and significant."

Editorial Reviews

"Binbin Yang’s book illuminates a new direction in the study of women’s literature in late imperial China. Aiming at (re)discovering women’s own autobiographical voices, this innovative and engaging book goes beyond poetry, which is often the source of such studies, to explore neglected literary and artistic genres: prefaces, (auto)biographies, inscriptions, paintings, letters, political essays, and medical texts . . . Yang has extended the discussion on writing women in late imperial China from a small privileged group of upper-class gentry women to educated women in poor households."

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) - Yu Zhang

"Through women’s own writings, Yang greatly expands our picture of gentry women’s roles in Qing society. She shows how women used their writings, not just to seek literary immortality through publication, but to empower themselves and to reform and renew their society. . . . Binbin Yang has made a most valuable contribution to our understanding of late Qing social, literary and political history."

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) - Paul S. Ropp

"Through women’s own writings, Yang greatly expands our picture of gentry women’s roles in Qing society. She shows how women used their writings, not just to seek literary immortality through publication, but to empower themselves and to reform and renew their society. . . . Binbin Yang has made a most valuable contribution to our understanding of late Qing social, literary and political history."

Chinese Literature: Essays

Through women’s own writings, Yang greatly expands our picture of gentry women’s roles in Qing society. She shows how women used their writings, not just to seek literary immortality through publication, but to empower themselves and to reform and renew their society. . . . Binbin Yang has made a most valuable contribution to our understanding of late Qing social, literary and political history.

Chinese Literature: Essays

"To those who have read ad nauseam the eulogies of long-suffering widows or women who committed suicide to guard their chastity in the predominant late imperial discourse on female exemplarity, Yang’s book offers a welcome alternative view of women’s lives that is not only more felicitous but also more representative . . . Methodologically innovative, carefully researched, and clearly written, Yang’s book makes an important contribution to the study of Chinese women’s history and will be used widely in both teaching and research."

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

"This study is not only of interest to students of traditional Chinese women’s literature. It ranges over fields as widely apart as print culture, art history, social history and medical history. In each of these fields it shows a far more assertive participation of women than is commonly assumed. . . . Equally relevant to the students of Republican history as to the students of Qing history. The book is very well written and throughout a pleasure to read."

Nan Nu: Men, Women, & Gender in China - Wilt L. Idema

This study is not only of interest to students of traditional Chinese women's literature. It ranges over fields as widely apart as print culture, art history, social history and medical history. In each of these fields it shows a far more assertive participation of women than is commonly assumed. . . . Equally relevant to the students of Republican history as to the students of Qing history. The book is very well written and throughout a pleasure to read.

--Wilt L. Idema "Nan Nu: Men, Women, & Gender in China"

Through women's own writings, Yang greatly expands our picture of gentry women's roles in Qing society. She shows how women used their writings, not just to seek literary immortality through publication, but to empower themselves and to reform and renew their society. . . . Binbin Yang has made a most valuable contribution to our understanding of late Qing social, literary and political history.

-- "Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) - Modern"

From the Publisher