Elvera Kwang Siam Lim Lecture: The Remaking of Li Qingzhao in Late Imperial and Modern China

Speaker: Ron Egan, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University.
This talk examines the way that the critical and scholarly tradition struggled to find a way to accommodate the woman poet Li Qingzhao (1084- ca. 1150s), who had burst into the largely male domain of writing with a brilliance that could not be denied. But this was a woman's talent, plus it was coupled with a penchant for delivering caustic remarks about other writers of her day (all male), so that it proved difficult for many arbiters of culture to accept. Consequently, the critical tradition found both ingenious and ingenuous ways of reformulating her and making her into someone it could live with and even admire. This talk examines the forces involved in this transformation of Li Qingzhao, which culminated in the late Qing dynasty, was written into the earliest twentieth-century histories of Chinese literature, and is still very much with us today.