| The topic of this dissertation is poetry on travel by women writers of late imperial China, especially from the mid-sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. During this period, not only was there an extraordinary florescence of women's writing, but their mobility was also greatly expanded compared to previous dynasties. As a consequence, travel, whether in the form of an actual journey or an imagined one, became a central topic in many women's poems. Despite the conventional assumption that pre-modern Chinese women were passive and confined, the travel poems discussed in this study point to a wide variety of travel experiences or, at the very least, a growing desire for physical mobility on the part of educated women of Ming-Qing China.;The subject of travel provided a larger literary space for women poets, especially elite women, to challenge the notion that their proper place was the boudoir and to question the seemingly fixed boundary between the inner and outer spheres. I study the topic of women's poetry and travel in its broader literary, social and historical contexts, and approach the topic from multiple perspectives, including the versatility of women's journeys, which were closely related to their personal circumstances and the changing social reality; women's re-inscription of "recumbent travel," a popular notion in male literati culture that symbolized artistic fashion and taste; the gendered reinvention of a traditional poetic genre roaming as a transcendent, and a case study on the excursions of a single Manchu woman poet Gu Taiqing (1799-1877), who was influenced by both Han and non-Han cultures.;In contrast to male literati's travel which was widely encouraged as a necessity of self-cultivation, women's travels were largely curtailed by gender norms. In other words, when travel was not a free choice, women had to negotiate their spaces beyond the boudoir strategically, and poems provided just such a space for enhancing and enriching their self-expression and gender consciousness as a poet and a woman. The proactive and innovative interactions with literary minds in their daily life enabled women poets to reach a wider world beyond the boudoir. |
