Nanxiu Qian. Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China

Nanxiu Qian’s new book Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform is a thoroughly researched and stimulating account of an extraordinary Chinese author, Xue Shaohui (1866–1911), and her cultural and political activities amidst the tumultuous late Qing era. Joining a growing body of scholarship of the past three decades that explores Ming and Qing women writers and their cultural activities, this book further enriches our understanding of women writers’ cultural and political roles in a politically contested era at the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing on its central figure, Xue Shaohui, and using archival materials ranging from the local gazetteers to late Qing newspapers, the book paints a rich tapestry of women’s participation in the 1898 reform movement, a subject matter neglected by conventional historiography, while further challenging the May Fourth view on the repressed nature of traditional women in patriarchal society. The book not only successfully “rescues” one important female poet, translator, journalist, and activist from obscurity; it also delves into a range of themes in dialogue with current studies of modern Chinese history: social networking in molding the character; translation and the introduction of Western knowledge; women’s roles in politics; and the feminine writing tradition and modernity.

Aesthetics · Art · China · Historiography · Literature · Media studies · Modernity · Newspaper · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies