Intimate Memory: Gender and Mourning in Late Imperial China (SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture) - Softcover

Huang W., Martin W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1438469004 ISBN 13: 9781438469003

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2019

Synopsis

Sheds new light on pre-modern Chinese gender relationships in the context of marriage, male Confucian literati self-presentation, and social networks.

In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memoirs, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies.

About this title

About the Author

Martin W. Huang is Professor of Chinese at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1438469004
• ISBN 13: 9781438469003
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232