Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction

by Li Guo

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612496443
Publisher:	Purdue University Press
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Series:	Comparative Cultural Studies
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Li Guo teaches Chinese language, literature, culture, and Asian literatures at Utah State University. Her interests in scholarship include late imperial and modern Chinese women’s narratives, folk literature, film, and comparative literature. Guo’s research displays an interdisciplinary approach, bridging women and gender studies, narrative theory, vernacular literatures and cultures, bringing an innovative perspective to traditional, text-based analysis of tanci fiction. She is the author of Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note on Style and Excerpts
Introduction: Toward a Spatialized Understanding of Women’s Literary Tanci
Chapter One: Vernacular Literacy, Cross-Dressing, and Feminine Authority in Zhu Suxian’s Yulianhuan (Linked Rings of Jade)
Chapter Two: Among Women: Feminine Homoeroticism in Li Guiyu’s Liuhuameng (Dream of the Pomegranate Flowers)
Chapter Three: Gender, Syncretism, and Female Exemplarity: Jin Fangquan’s Qizhenzhuan (A Tale of Exceptional Chastity)
Chapter Four: “Beyond Rouge and Powder”: Rewriting Female Talent in Sun Deying’s Jinyuyuan (Affinity of the Golden Fish)
Chapter Five: A New Romance of the Nation-State: On Wang Oushang’s Zixuji (A Tale of Vacuity)
Conclusion
Glossary
Works Cited
Index
About the Author

Editorial Reviews

"With thorough archival research, Guo’s monograph enriches current understanding of female tanci writers, their life experiences, and their literary networks. This monograph inspires more exciting research on the genre of tanci fiction, and a full vision of women’s literature and early modern Chinese literature will eventually challenge the conventional concept of literary canon." —Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

"Using a comparative perspective, Guo deftly creates stimulating conversations between Chinese tanci fiction writing and the rich scholarship on Western vernacular literacy. Guo's interdisciplinary approach contributes to studies of the non-Western vernacular tradition as well as women and gender in China. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." — CHOICE

"Building on her seminal first book and focusing on five understudied nineteenth-century tanci, Guo takes readers deep into the imaginary social space that women tanci 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." —Weijing Lu, author of True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China

"Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction takes the reader on an absorbing journey through five < 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 tanci 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." —Maria Franca Sibau, author of Reading for the Moral: Exemplarity and the Confucian Moral Imagination in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Short Fiction

"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 tanci narratives that will resonate with global audiences. Building on the author's earlier writings about the genre, Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction significantly advances the field of vernacular Chinese literature, Chinese women's literature, and tanci studies to new and welcome levels." —Mark Bender, The Ohio State University

"Guo shares with us her exhaustive research, insightful textual analysis, remarkable vigor in theorizing, and critical awareness of writing for a global audience. I also enjoyed reading her beautiful translation of passages from her tanci texts, which, ideally, could be coupled with the Chinese original. Scholarly readers interested in vernacular literature, gender and women's studies, nineteenth-century China, and the global writing women tradition will find Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction a rewarding read and an important reference to keep." —China Review International

From the Publisher