Dr. Haihong Yang

​Dr. Haihong Yang. Women's Poetry and Poetics in Late Imperial China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. This book 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. 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."