Abstract:


Recent decades have witnessed the remarkable rediscovery of the emergence and flourishing of a women’s literary culture in China’s last two imperial dynasties, the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911). Numerous women from literati families engaged in the pursuit of education and writing. The poetry they wrote was often printed as individual collections and circulated among family and friends. By the time of the first Opium War (1839-1842), elite women had long established their literary presence in the world of letters. The upsurge of their literary production from the seventeenth century happens to parallel the steady spread of opium smoking in Chinese society leading up to the two Opium Wars in the nineteenth century. The current recovery of their writings enables research into women’s lives and experiences that are articulated in their own words, offering insights into dimensions that have been obscured or overlooked because women were excluded from public life in pre-twentieth century China. As opium would have been an unusual topic for women to write about, this paper exploits the latest reprints and the digitization of several hundred collections of writings by women in the Ming Qing Women’s Writings digital archive and database (http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/) to discover what social, cultural, and political encounters women writers might have had with opium and opium smoking. Their experience of and reactions to the Opium Wars open the possibility to construct a comparative gender framework for future research.


Biography:


Grace Fong is Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University. She received her PhD in classical Chinese poetry from the University of British Columbia. She teaches courses on Chinese culture, poetry, fiction, and women writers, as well as Classical Chinese. Her research encompasses classical Chinese poetry and poetics, women writers of late imperial China, and autobiographical writing in pre-modern China. Engaged in exploring the potential of developments in digital humanities for new modes of critical inquiry in the domain of literary studies, she has been directing the Ming Qing Women’s Writings digital archive and database project (http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/) since its inception in 2003. Launched by the McGill University Library in 2005, the website provides free access to digitized images and searchable data of women’s literary collections and anthologies from Late Imperial China for research on women’s history and culture. She is Editor of the Women and Gender in China Studies series published by Brill. Her recent publications include the monograph Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China (University of Hawaii Press, 2008) and the co-edited volumes Different Worlds of Discourse: The Transformation of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Brill, 2008) and The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming through Qing (Brill, 2010). Her latest translations of women’s poetry appear in Jade Mirror: Women Poets of China (White Pine Press, 2013).