Women’s Literary Criticism In Ming And Qing Dynasty

On the impact of the theory of feminism, the writing of ancient Chinese women has been discovered and introduced by an increasing number of scholars both at home and abroad since the 1980’s. With the regard to the relationship between women and literature in ancient China, a number of women not only wrote as a writer, but also made literary criticisms on their own hands. Through a series of forms and ways, such as editing collections of poems and essays, writing prefaces and postscript, criticizing poem by poems, women in Ming and Qing dynasty revealed their viewpoints on plenty of aspects on literature.In order to make a systematic study on those views and thoughts, the essay collects a number of related materials, relates them with the literary activities of women in Ming and Qing dynasty, and puts them on the entire historic background of culture and literature.This essay is divided into three parts. The first part puts focus on the historical analysis by reviewing the literary criticism of female writers from the beginning of Ming Dynasty to the late of Qing Dynasty to clarify the historical background and evolution of their thoughts on literary criticism. The second part puts efforts on a compilation of literary criticism on different literal works in different forms by female writers in Ming and Qing Dynasty to discover the commonness and to analyze the deeply-rooted ideology at that time. The third part elaborates on case studies of four topical female critics in Ming and Qing Dynasty.The first chapter focuses on the women’s literary criticism in Ming Dynasty, especially the middle and later period. With the social development, women’s social status and artistic appreciation had been improved. Against this background, some educated women began to select and edit collections of women’s poems, showing their relatively independent literary views and criteria for criticism. Meanwhile some of them delivered their literary conceptions by writing prefaces and postscripts for poem collections and traditional Chinese operas.The second chapter studies women’s literary criticism in early and middle of Qing Dynasty. More and more women contributed to the edition and selection of women’s poems in this time. Paying much attention to the collection and the criteria of selection of the poems in their own era, they tried to establish the literary tradition of women. At the same time, a large number of notes on poets and poems (shi hua) and poems criticizing poems (lun shi shi) sprung up, showing women’s opinions on literary criticism both fragmental and systematical. Discussions on role’s gender, principles of play-writing and receptional psychology in traditional Chinese operas also appeared.The third chapter gives much emphasis to the late Qing Dynasty. Women’s literary criticism exhibited much more diversities and complexities in the environment of social turbulence and revolution. Represented by The collection of women poets in Qing Dynasty and criticizing poems by poems in Room Xiaodai, new achievements were made in poetry criticism. Some women who received modern education started to think critically about the position of women as well as traditional literature in the traditional culture from different angles.The fourth chapter analyzes the widespread and representative critical opinions proposed by female critics in Ming and Qing Dynasty. A lot of them discussed the relationship between the internal emotions and external opportunities in the process of writing poems. On one hand, they showed respects to writers of previous dynasties, on the other hand, they displayed their own aesthetic orientation and criteria for criticism. Some of them even emphasized women’s talents in literature and the position in literary tradition, which obviously showed their gender consciousness.The fifth chapter gives a glimpse on the phenomena that some talented women chose to give up their literary persuit and analyzes the factors which influence women’s literary value in Ming and Qing Dynasty, such as Confucianism, the psychological suggestion of "great talents would lead to miserable life", Buddhism and Taoism.The sixth chapter decodes and analyzes the emotional dimension in the literary criticism written by women in Ming and Qing Dynasty who were influenced by the kinship, regional culture, mentoring relationship etc.The seventh chapter explores Wang Duanshu and her work Preliminary Collection of Famed Talented Women’s Poetry. Wang Duanshu insisted that poetry should have a"poetry heart"with the elements of "intention""emotion""enjoyment" rather than blindly follow the poetic style of the glorious age of Tang dynasty. In terms of aesthetic style, Wang Duanshu appreciated the simplicity of poetry and advocated female poets write beyond "boudoir"style. As far as Wang Duanshu was concerned, creating Sanqu was more difficult than writing poems; therefore she showed more admiration for women who created outstanding works of Sanqu..In the eighth chapter, discussion was carried out around Xi Peilan. As one of the female disciples of Yuan Mei, her literary ideology embedded in Changzhen Attic Poetry Collection still embodied characteristics of both Yuan Mei and herself. She was pure and indifferent to fame and fortune and strongly averse to the "feminine poems" with obvious feminine characteristics. What’s more, she maintained that the poetry creation should be capable of achieving something meaningful; Just like the cultivation of trees and flowers, poetry creation also had some specific rules to follow.The ninth chapter emphasises on Wang Duan. Her critic works reflected her pursuit on truth and fair, showed her attention to the Moral behavior of the poets.Also,she suggested that women could write something beyond their gender limitations.The tenth chapter analyzes the characteristics of Shen Shanbao’s Poetic Remarks of Famed Talented Women. This book adopted various ways to categorize women poets and their works according to their relations and common characteristics, by doing so, it highlighted the overall style of young lady poets and underlined their family tradition of learning. Aesthetically, Shen Shanbao preferred "clearness" " vigorousness" and "sophistication" in poems. While compiling Poetic Remarks of Famed Talented Women, Shen integrated her own life experiences, attempting to build the evaluation criteria for female literature.Through the analysis of these women’characteristics and their works mentioned above, it is not difficult to find that the mainstream literary concept dominated by male had some influence on them. Meanwhile, their distinct thoughts and insights on literature which reveal the independent value of feminine literary criticism to some extent, can also be extracted from the analysis.