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This article discusses the multiple expressions of women's agency through the case study of Tao Shan (1756–1780), a Chinese Buddhist laywoman in the eighteenth century. By focusing on the poems of Tao Shan and her life and afterlife accounts composed by Peng Shaosheng (1740–1796), a Buddhist layman and Tao Shan's religious mentor, this study aims to reveal how Tao Shan diverged from Peng Shaosheng with respect to androcentric discourses in Buddhism and approaches to promoting Pure Land belief and practice. This article argues that Tao Shan's agency was constituted and demonstrated not through confrontational challenges to the patriarchal structure, but through dismissing and benignly ignoring the Buddhist and Confucian concepts that degraded women in order to embrace and uphold the concepts that justify gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The introduction and translation of Sylvia Plath's (1932-63) poetry into Chinese in the 1980s had a significant impact on women's poetry in contemporary China, particularly the work of Zhai Yongming (b. 1955) and Lu Yimin (b. 1962). Expanding on Lawrence Venuti's theory of translation and intertextuality, this article explores the relationship between Chinese translations of Plath and the poetry of Zhai and Lu. It examines four sets of Plath translations and the accompanying paratextual commentaries, demonstrating how Plath's Chinese translators inscribe their individual interpretations onto their translations. It shows how these texts are integral in shaping the early poetic output of Zhai and Lu, who further recontextualize Plath through their own poetry, revealing how Plath has been understood, evaluated, and transformed in contemporary China. Ultimately, this process results in a bold new gendered poetics that marks a turning point in Chinese women's writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the trope of withdrawal in the works of Li Yin (1616-85) and Huang Yuanjie (ca. 1620-ca. 1669), two women poets of the Ming-Qing transition period. It explores how the trope was constructed and constantly modified in literati discourses, and how women writers appropriated it for self-representation. The trope of withdrawal contributes to the poetic delineation of the writers' life experiences, allowing the speaking-voice agency and new subject positions denied to them in reality, while closely relating to the writers' fantasies, anxieties, self-introspection, and social critiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses representations of femininity in the poetry of three women authors from China -- Zhai Yongming (b. 1955), Lü Yue (b. 1972), and Zheng Xiaoqiong (b. 1980) -- whose works are associated with a distinct feminine poetics. These poets do not shy away from representing their feminist point of view, and their texts are often written against the hegemony of a male-centered literary discourse. At the same time, however, they counter some of our longstanding expectations surrounding female-authored poetry. Drawing upon examples from their works I argue that since the late 1980s, the past and present subaltern condition of women has been a crucial point of interest for women poets in Mainland China. Since then, these authors have been preoccupied with the search not only for an independent poetic language, but also for a genealogy of female creativity, to which they might adhere in their artistic endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by poet Lü Yue delivered at Gulangyu Poetry Festival held in Xiamen, China. Topics discussed include the basic problem of contemporary poetry and contemporary literature, rural imaginary used in classical tradition of Chinese poetry, and several aspects of contemporary poetry which includes classical or modern poems. Other topics include the relationship between contemporary poetry and readers, and contemporary Chinese women's poetry.

The Chinese china represented in the eighteenth-century English poetry is the focus of both men and women's aesthetic appreciation and desire. Men reduce women to the object of their aesthetic appreciation and desire by drawing an analogy between china and women and by objectifying women into china, whereas women, by means of requesting, seeing and consuming china, foreground their subjectivity and value by projecting their aesthetic appreciation and desire onto the beautiful and delicate china. In addition, women dissolve and transcend the binary opposition between "earthenware/man" and "china/women" constructed by the male-centered discourse through endowing china with multi-gender and multi-identity. The end of the eighteenth century witnesses the fall of Chinese china in English society; hence it has lost its focal position and been replaced by other materials as the above-mentioned focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss article published within the issue dealing with such topics as feminism in the French Revolution, Chinese woman poet Jin Yi, and transnational women's antifascist movements.

Youxian shi (poetry on roaming as a transcendent) has long been a conventional poetic genre in Chinese literature. It has been the common conception that youxian poetry was most popular from the Wei dynasty (220-265) through the Tang dynasty (618-907), and up until now, scholarly studies on the genre seemed to focus exclusively on Tang and pre-Tang periods. This gives the impression that after the Tang nothing of interest was written in this particular genre. Consequently, very little scholarly attention has been given to the youxian poems composed in post-Tang periods. This article examines youxian poems by Qing (1644-1911) women, specifically those poems entitled Nü youxian (roaming as a female transcendent). With the increasing consciousness of "self," the rise of groups of women writers, and the popularity of women's culture in late imperial China, youxian poems provided a unique literary space for women's poetic and autobiographical voices, certainly deserving more scholarly attention. I argue that by presenting female transcendents or women pursuing transcendence at the center of a poem and re-inscribing the traditional literary images, the poets created a stronger female subjectivity that reflected women's desires in their intellectual and spiritual lives. I also propose that nü youxian was a new subgenre of youxian poetry, emerging only in the context of the efflorescence of women's poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary critics who study women's literature often focus on the very act of speaking, or the possession of a write. The speaker in a poem seems to lend the women of her time a voice to express their feelings and in so doing offers a female perspective on social and cultural aspects of life. Adopting ideas from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own as well as Hélène Cixous's nolion of "writing the body," this article explores how women poets find a private space in their own rooms for examining "liberated" selves. A new conception of body and space is presented in these lyric voices. In contrast, in the voices of many critics, we hear a glaring double standard that exposes the persistence of patriarchal inhibition of women's freedom of expression. This dialogic tension between the voices reveals women's predicaments and their strong protests against the status quo in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of papers included in the Fall 2014 issue of the "Harvard Asia Quarterly," with topics such as the orchid paintings of 17th century Chinese courtesans to illuminate how they were seen as tokens of courtship or seduction, the transformation of female student imagery in China from the late Qing to early Republic era, and a look at three Chinese female poets.