Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / G. Fong and E. Widmer -- Introduction / Grace S. Fong -- Chapter One. Writing And Illness: A Feminine Condition In Women’s Poetry Of The Ming And Qing / Grace S. Fong -- Chapter Two. Lamenting The Dead: Women’s Performance Of Grief In Late Imperial China / Anne E. McLaren -- Chapter Three. Retrieving The Past: Women Editors And Women’s Poetry, 1636–1941 / Ellen Widmer -- Chapter Four. The Unseen Hand: Contextualizing Luo Qilan And Her Anthologies / Robyn Hamilton -- Chapter Five. From Private Life To Public Performances: The Constituted Memory And (Re)Writings Of The Early-Qing Woman Wu Zongai / Wei Hua -- Chapter Six. Women Writers And Gender Boundaries During The Ming-Qing Transition / Wai-Yee Li -- Chapter Seven. Chan Friends: Poetic Exchanges Between Gentry Women And Buddhist Nuns In Seventeenth-Century China / Beata Grant -- Chapter Eight. War, Violence, And The Metaphor Of Blood In Tanci Narratives By Women Authors / Siao-Chen Hu -- Chapter Nine. The Lady And The State: Women’s Writings In Times Of Trouble During The Nineteenth Century (Susan Mann) / G. Fong and E. Widmer -- Chapter Ten. Imagining History And The State: Fujian Guixiu (Genteel Ladies) At Home And On The Road / Guotong Li -- Chapter Eleven. Xue Shaohui And Her Poetic Chronicle Of Late Qing Reforms / Nanxiu Qian -- Literary Authorship By Late Imperial Governing-Class Chinese Women And The Emergence Of A \'Minor Literature\' / Maureen Robertson -- The Inner Quarters And Beyond: Women Writers From Ming Through Qing And Its Deliberations On A \'Minor Literature\' / Ellen Widmer -- About The Contributors / G. Fong and E. Widmer -- Bibliography / G. Fong and E. Widmer -- Index / G. Fong and E. Widmer.

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Only recently has the enormous literary output of women writers of the Ming and Qing periods (1368-1911) been rediscovered. Through these valuable texts, we apprehend in ways not possible earlier the complexity of women’s experiences in the inner quarters and their varied responses to challenges facing state and society. Writing in many genres, women engaged with topics as varied as war, travel, illness, love, friendship, female heroism, and religion. Drawing on a library of newly digitized resources, this volume's eleven chapters describe, analyze, and theorize these materials. They question previous assumptions about women’s lives and abilities, open up new critical space in Chinese literary history and offer new perspectives on China’s culture and society. “This volume rewrites the history of Chinese women’s literature by taking a truly inter-disciplinary (instead of merely multi-disciplinary) approach. In so doing, it ends up illuminating the centrality of writing women to the social, political, and intellectual lives of the Chinese empire from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.” Prof. Dorothy Ko, Barnard College, Columbia University, author of Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (California, 2005).