Intimate Memory: Gender and Mourning in Late Imperial China

by Martin W. Huang

Overview

In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memoirs, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438469010
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Series:	SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Martin W. Huang is Professor of Chinese at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. The Secularization of Memory

2. Survivor’s Guilt

3. Hagiographical Memory

4. Wounded Manhood

5. Fragments of Anxiety

6. Remembering Concubines

7. Circulating Grief

8. Remembering Sisters

Epilogue: A Wife’s Remembrances
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This book is a welcome addition to the literature on mourning in late imperial China." — Monumenta Serica

"…the works Huang describes offer us invaluable glimpses of the domestic lives of elite officials in late imperial China." — CHOICE

From the Publisher