Courtesan, Editor, and Examination Candidate : Fashioning the Female Self in Late Ming China
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2014-03-30
Author(s)
Abstract
Recent research has examined the emergence of the woman editor in early modern China, establishing that courtesans Xue Susu and Wang Wei counted among the first women to edit literary anthologies and inscribe their voices into elite culture, probably preceding the known gentlewomen editors by one or more decades (Berg, 2013). While there is mostly silence about perceptions of editorship as a form of female self-fashioning, this paper argues that the emergence of women examination candidates in cultural discourse from the late Ming onwards appears as a linked phenomenon that provides rare insight into how women in male roles were perceived and received. If China's imperial system barred women from competing in the civil service examinations until the doomed Taiping reform movement in 1853, the vision of women as both examination candidates and authors of examination essays began to crowd the pages of both male and female authored writings. Analysis of women examination candidates provokes interest first, because male authors began to imagine and stage their existence in courtesan culture; and second, because gentlewomen began to write about them, too. This paper compares new insights into the editorial activities of courtesans Xue Susu and Wang Wei to the emerging visions of women as examination candidates in works by the literati and gentlewomen, including Ye Xiaowan's (1613-1657) Yuanyang meng (1636). Analysis will shed light on the impact of the emergence of women in male roles and social change in early modern Chinese men and women's imagination.
Language
English
Keywords
Women
China
woman poet
courtesan culture
literati culture
elite culture
Xue Susu
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area
SHSS - Kulturen, Institutionen, Maerkte (KIM)
Refereed
No
Book title
Proceedings of the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies
Publisher
Association for Asian Studies
Event Title
Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) 2014
Event Location
Philadelphia, PA
Event Date
27.-30.03.2014
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
236487
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
open.access
Name
Berg Courtesan AAS 2014.pdf
Size
278.6 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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