Heroines of the Qing
Binbin Yang
Heroines of the Qing introduces an array of Chinese women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were powerful, active subjects of their own lives and who wrote themselves as the heroines of their exemplary stories. Traditionally, “exemplary women” (lienu)—heroic martyrs, chaste widows, and faithful maidens, for example—were written into official dynastic histories for their unrelenting adherence to female virtue by Confucian family standards. However, despite the rich writing traditions about these women, their lives were often distorted by moral and cultural agendas. Binbin Yang, drawing on interdisciplinary sources, shows how they were able to cross boundaries that were typically closed to women—boundaries not only of gender, but also of knowledge, economic power, political engagement, and ritual and cultural authority. Yang closely examines the rhetorical strategies these “exemplary women” exploited for self-representation in various writing genres and highlights their skillful negotiation with, and appropriation of, the values of female exemplarity for self-empowerment.
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About Binbin Yang
Reviews for Heroines of the Qing
Wilt L. Idema
Nan Nu: Men, Women, & Gender in China
"Through women’s own writings, Yang greatly expands our picture of gentry women’s roles in Qing society. She shows how women used their writings, not just to seek literary immortality through publication, but to empower themselves and to reform and renew their society. . . . Binbin Yang has made a most valuable contribution to our understanding of late Qing social, literary and political history."
Paul S. Ropp
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR)
"Binbin Yang’s book illuminates a new direction in the study of women’s literature in late imperial China. Aiming at (re)discovering women’s own autobiographical voices, this innovative and engaging book goes beyond poetry, which is often the source of such studies, to explore neglected literary and artistic genres: prefaces, (auto)biographies, inscriptions, paintings, letters, political essays, and medical texts . . . Yang has extended the discussion on writing women in late imperial China from a small privileged group of upper-class gentry women to educated women in poor households."
Yu Zhang
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR)
"To those who have read ad nauseam the eulogies of long-suffering widows or women who committed suicide to guard their chastity in the predominant late imperial discourse on female exemplarity, Yang’s book offers a welcome alternative view of women’s lives that is not only more felicitous but also more representative . . . Methodologically innovative, carefully researched, and clearly written, Yang’s book makes an important contribution to the study of Chinese women’s history and will be used widely in both teaching and research."
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)