Gender and Interpretation:
Form and Rhetoric in Ming-Qing Women’s Poetic Criticism

Grace S. Fong
McGill University

In this paper I will investigate the forms and rhetoric of reading women’s poetry adopted by women poets and critics from the period of the Ming-Qing transition to the late Qing. These include discursive practices located in prefatory materials to anthologies and poetry collections, letters, shihua literature (critical works focussing on poetry), and critical anthologies. In particular, I will discuss and compare the critical principles and rhetorical strategies underlying the commentaries in three acclaimed works produced during three different historical junctures: Wang Duanshu’s (1621-c. 1706) Mingyuan shiwei of the Ming-Qing transition, Xiong Lian’s (18th century) Danxian shihua, and Shen Shanbao’s (1 808-1862) Mingyuan shihua. The comparative framework will draw attention to the historical and political contexts of production.

As women’s poetic writings vastly increased during the late Ming and the Qing, their visibility generated numerous debates regarding their meaning, value, and purpose in a society that did not recognize any public function for such production, and often regarded poetry writing as inappropriate for women. This situation also provoked women’s self-consciousness concerning their literary production. Their responses, in various forms, address the question of the value and meaning of their own writings in both personal and cultural contexts. By examining these textual forms and rhetorical strategies, I want to explore if and how women saw their critical activities as operating in the larger context of literary history and evaluation. What critical issues do they engage with, and how? Do they draw on existing theoretical principles and critical concepts in their arguments? What is the relative significance of moral and aesthetic principles deployed by women for reading women’s (and men’s) poetry? Preliminary research suggests that some women implicitly appropriated Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610) and the Gongan School’s emphasis on native sensibility and self-expression (xingling) to claim their legitimacy in a male-dominated tradition of writing.