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Dr. Haihong Yang: Women’s Poetry and Poetics in Late Imperial China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Women’s Poetry and Poetics in Late Imperial China explores poetic forms in which women wrote, and investigates poetic devices which women innovatively employed to create agency and negotiate their literary, social, and political concerns. It recognizes the contributions of women-authored poems and criticism to the construction and evolution of a distinct women’s poetic tradition in dynastic China. It argues that gentry-class women used lyric poetry and poetic criticism as an important venue to engage themselves in the construction and modification of important discourses, be they cultural, social, or political. In this book, I endeavor to re-chart a literary landscape which is inclusive, rather than exclusive, a landscape where different poetic aesthetics are mutually informative and generative. The book examines the interactions between women’s poetic creations and existing discourses in the literati tradition, and study how these interactions generate innovative self-re-inscription and renovations in poetic forms and aesthetics. Women, just like their literati counterparts, wrote within the vast and heterogeneous literati tradition. At the same time, they also wrote beyond. The tension between women’s act of writing and self-reinscription on one hand, and the cultural and social limitations on their writing contexts on the other, results in a discernible women’s writing tradition, a heterogeneous and protein process of construction instead of a stable and static “being.”
This book conducts close reading of selected works and theoretical analysis of these works. It historicizes its reading of these works and examines them in their interactions with their literary and cultural contexts. It appeals to scholars and college students in the field of gender studies, Asian studies, Chinese literature and literary history. General audience who are interested in classical Chinese literature and culture will also enjoy discovering and reading the poetic creations by women writers on topics varying from the pleasure of appreciating a snow-woman, a quiet moment when the poet reflects upon her life, to reunion with the writer’s female friends and her comments on current political and cultural issues.
