| The first four decades of the twentieth century gave rise to numerous publications of poems authored by Chinese women, but contemporary critics and readers have neglected the literary production of these poets, customarily dismissing their writing as distinctly feminine, sentimental, and thereby inconsequential. This dissertation contends that the reason for their literary marginality is two-fold. Since the turn of the century, intellectuals have degraded the lyrical and the sentimental, conflating both with the feminine. At the same time, however, literary historians and critics have perpetuated the stereotype of a woman poet as one whose work is inherently feminine, lyrical, and nonthreatening (what I refer to as the "poetess style"), resulting in the canonization of a poetess aesthetic which renders other types of women poets barely visible. I argue that early modern Chinese women poets are thus caught in a double bind as their work is trivialized, essentialized, and ultimately excluded from the canon: those who adhere to this style are deemed bad writers, and those who do not are relegated to invisibility.;Engaging largely overlooked primary texts spanning the decline of the Qing to the war against Japan, I demonstrate how these women are heirs of the shared task of negotiating earlier, and generally more private, traditions of female writing with the public self-in(ter)vention of the modern poet and modern woman during an era of continuous political and ideological upheavals. Straddling the juncture between traditional and modern Chinese poetry, this project illuminates the various textual strategies early modern women poets employ to reclaim, reinvent, and subvert male-constructed tropes of femininity and expectations of how a woman poet should write amidst the larger context of competing notions of women's writings. |
