Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China,Used

"Grace Fong has written a wonderful history of female writers participation in the elite conventions of Chinese poetics. Fongs recovery of many of these poets, her able exegesis and elegant, analytical grasp of what the poets were doing is a great read, and her bilingual presentation of their poetry gives the book additional power. This is a persuasive and elegant study." Tani Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism"In this quietly authoritative book, Grace Fong has brought a group of women poets back to life. Previously ignored by scholars because of their marginal status or the inaccessibility of their works, these remarkable writers now speak to us about the sensualities, pains, satisfactions, and sadness of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Professor Fonga superb translator of Chinese poetry, prose, and criticismhas rendered the works of these women in a way that is true both to our theoretical concerns and theirs." Dorothy Ko, author of Cinderellas Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding"Professor Fong approaches the poetry of MingQing upperclass women as a socialcultural activity that allowed these women to manifest their agency and assert their own subjectivity against the background of virtual and actual networks of fellow female poets. As the distillation of more than ten years of research by one of the leading scholars in this field, this work is a timely contribution that eminently deserves our attention. Given the inclusion of translations of some of the texts discussed, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to the reading of womens poetry of the MingQing period." Wilt Idema, Harvard UniversityHerself an Author addresses the critical question of how to approach the study of womens writing. It explores various methods of engaging in a meaningful way with a rich corpus of poetry and prose written by women of the late Ming and Qing periods, much of it rediscovered by the author in rare book collections in China and the United States. The volume treats different genres of writing and includes translations of texts that are made available for the first time in English. Among the works considered are the lifelong poetic record of Gan Lirou, the lyrical travel journal kept by Wang Fengxian, and the erotic poetry of the concubine Shen Cai.Taking the view that gentry womens varied textual production was a form of cultural practice, Grace Fong examines womens autobiographical poetry collections, travel writings, and critical discourse on the subject of womens poetry, offering fresh insights on womens intervention into the dominant male literary tradition. The wealth of texts translated and discussed here include fascinating documents written by concubineswomen who occupied a subordinate position in the family and social system. Fong adopts the notion of agency as a theoretical focus to investigate forms of subjectivity and enactments of subject positions in the intersection between textual practice and social inscription. Her reading of the life and work of women writers reveals surprising instances and modes of selfempowerment within the gender constraints of Confucian orthodoxy. Fong argues that literate women in late imperial China used writing and reading to create literary and social communities, transcend temporalspatial and social limitations, and represent themselves as the authors of their own life histories.