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Annotation "Why did traditional Chinese literati so often identify themselves with women in their writing? What can this tell us about how they viewed themselves as men and how they understood masculinity? How did their attitudes in turn shape the martial heroes and other masculine models they constructed? Martin Huang attempts to answer these questions in this valuable work on manhood in late imperial China. He focuses on the ambivalent and often paradoxical role played by women and the feminine in the intricate negotiating process of male gender identity in late imperial cultural discourses. On the one hand, women were shunned as a threat to manhood; on the other, they were celebrated as the natural exemplars of loyalty, an important Confucian virtue. Thus the image of the loyal minister was often problematized by the feminine implications of Confucian loyalty." "At the first book-length study of late imperial Chinese masculinities, this volume covers a wide range of primary texts, including Confucian classics, historical narratives, political treatises, poems, essays, dramas, fictional narratives, and conduct guides. It emphasizes the nuances and pluralistic nature of masculinities as they were being constantly contested and reinvented."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Preliminary Material /M.W. Huang -- Male Friendship In Ming China: An Introduction /Martin W. Huang -- Friendship Through Fourteenth-Century Fissures: Dai Liang, Wu Sidao And Ding Henian /Anne Gerritsen -- Music And Male Bonding In Ming China /Joseph S. C. Lam -- A Friendship Of Metal And Stone: Representations Of Fan Juqing And Zhang Yuanbo In The Ming Dynasty /Kimberly Besio -- Male Friendship And Jiangxue (Philosophical Debates) In Sixteenth-Century China /Martin W. Huang -- A Selected Bibliography Of Secondary Sources /Martin W. Huang -- Index /Harriet T. Zurndorfer.

Abstract
This article investigates how sons in the scholar-literati class in late imperial China promoted their mothers as Confucian exemplars. From the position and perspectives of a son, what were the strategies of promotion, and how might these strategies be related to the different social roles Confucian literati were expected to play? Through an examination of sons' written tributes to their mothers in a variety of biographical and commemorative genres, this article argues that these writings show an increasing enthusiasm to promote mothers as Confucian exemplars during this historical period, and that this phenomenon was related to these writers' endeavors to promote themselves as members of the Confucian cultural elite and to raise their own social profiles. Some of these writings also expose sons' potential conflicting obligations in the context of polygamy, in which the mother's status as wife or concubine of the father could complicate the son's commemoration and raise questions about the proper ways in which the son could show respect to his different mothers (whether formal mother or concubine mother), especially when his own birth mother happened to be his father's concubine.