| This dissertation argues that the Chinese woman poets Li Qingzhao (1084-ca. 1155) and Zhu Shuzhen(1135?-1180?) were canonized as the two greatest women writers in Chinese history. I show that Li Qingzhao and Zhu Shuzhen's canonization enabled the explosion of women's writing in the late Ming (1550-1644). The first two chapters of the dissertation address Zhu Shuzhen's reception and canonization from the Southern Song (1127-1279) to the Ming (1368-1644), the second two address Li Qingzhao's reception during the same time period, and the final chapter concerns the phenomenon of Li Qingzhao and Zhu Shuzhen as a canonical pair from the Qing (1644-1912) to the late twentieth-century. Zhu Shuzhen has mostly been ignored in the West, and I begin by analyzing the 1182 preface to her collected works, Duanchang ji (Heartbreak), collected by the Southern Song literatus Wei Duanli (1130-ca.1184). I then examine Zhu Shuzhen's canonization in the Ming, arguing that male literati promoted Zhu Shuzhen by eroticizing her. With Li Qingzhao, I begin with Southern Song anthologies that collect her poetry, and show that the early thirteenth- century anthology Caotang shiyu (Extra Poems from Thatched Hut) was the primary vessel for Li Qingzhao's canonization in the late Ming. In the dissertation's final chapter, I examine Kenneth Rexroth's (1905-1982) translations of Li Qingzhao and Zhu Shuzhen. |
