Suchergebnisse

What can we learn about modern Chinese history by reading a marginalized set of materials from a widely neglected period? In Republican Lens, Joan Judge retrieves and revalorizes the vital brand of commercial culture that arose in the period surrounding China's 1911 Revolution. Dismissed by high-minded ideologues of the late 1910s and largely overlooked in subsequent scholarship, this commercial culture has only recently begun to be rehabilitated in mainland China. Judge uses one of its most striking, innovative-and continually mischaracterized-products, the journal Funü shibao (The women's ea

Recent Chinese women's history focuses on the production of globally-inflected, locally situated Chinese knowledge about modernity, the gendered body, and female selfhood. This article explores three particularly fertile areas of research that explore various facets of this global/local nexus while challenging broader historical narratives and expanding the existing historical archive. The first is the emergence at the turn of the twentieth century of a feminist analytics of reform that defies conventional notions of Chinese modernity. The second is the theorization and practice of women's medicine from the imperial through the communist eras that highlights the singularity of Chinese conceptions of the gendered body and the social status of the female healer. The third is the uncovering of non-textual avenues to—and the questioning of the very premises of—Chinese women's historical experience through oral history and visual sources.

Western heroines became world heroines in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chinese social imaginary—universal stand-ins for the possibilities of modern womanhood. Reformers committed to resolving the Chinese woman question in this period used the dramatic stories of Joan of Arc, Madame Roland, and other foreign icons in the same way their literati forebears had used the two-millennia-long Chinese tradition of exemplary female biography: as a technology of the female self, a means of regulating and imagining feminine subjecthood. These later authors, nonetheless, shifted biography's basic function and temporal thrust. Making it an instrument of self-creation rather than merely of emulation, they used it to advance competing aspirations for Chinese modernity, female heroism, and a strengthened nation. Their often conflicting representations of Western women's lives ultimately expose fissures in China's own national project. They also highlight the complex ways the female embodiment of the translocal West was integral to definitions of the non-Western local.

"Clear, coherent, richly documented, and highly persuasive. I know of no other source devoted exclusively to the topic of Chinese women's biographies, and I am confident that this book will have a ready audience in the China field and beyond." Paul Ropp, Clark University "In addition to Liu Xiang's Lienü zhuan, the Urtext of Chinese women's biography, this rich trove of essays explores previously unexamined biographical genres and mines literary texts for their biographical potential. It will be of great value to scholars interested in women's history, life-writing, and biography, both in the China field and in comparative contexts." Grace S. Fong, McGill University This volume develops new strategies for reading, contextualizing, and interpreting the long Chinese tradition of women's biography. Drawing upon a vast array of sources—from formal biography to poetry, letters, and oral interviews—the authors examine how women's biography served particular cultural, political, and world-making projects, and how it illuminates these projects in new ways by highlighting tensions within and between them. Joan Judge is a professor of history and humanities at York University. Hu Ying is a professor of East Asian languages and literatures at the University of California, Irvine. Contributors: Beverly Bossler, Katherine Carlitz, Patricia Ebrey, Hu Ying, Gail Hershatter, Wilt L. Idema, Joan Judge, Weijing Lu, Susan Mann, Nanxiu Qian, Ann Waltner, Ellen Widmer, Ping Yao, Yu Chien-ming, Harriet T. Zurndorfer