Xu Yuan Poetry

Xu Yuan(1560-1619), whose courtesy name is Xiaoshu, is a native of Chang Zhou(now called Su Zhou, in Jiang Su Province).As the daughter of Xu Taishi and the wife of Fan Yunlin, she was named as a lady poetess in the Wan Li decades of Ming Dynasty, whose collection of poems called Luo Wei Yin was cataloged in Yi Wenzhi of the History of Ming. With a profound command of poetry, she was excellent in the former and win the credit of "two masters of Wu Men" with another poet named Lu Qingzi.Adopting close reading of the text as a substantial method, choosing Xu's Luo Wei Yin as the very example, this thesis aims at finding the innovative and singular qualities of writing pieces of those genius ladies in Jiang Nan district among the Ming and the Qing Dynasties and discussing the contradiction which can be perceived from that particular group of ladies said above by referring to the grand background of the social and cultural features of the late Ming Dynasty and the changing and conserving of the literature tradition in the district of central Wu. The contradiction above which refers to one lies between the broad social intercourses and poetry exchanges among women of all ranks and classes in the circumstances of late Ming's opening atmosphere and the increasing self-discipline of women's morality which brought a larger amount of moral women had its reflection upon contemporary literature and through this reflection we can unravel the manifestation of the feminine ego or conscious in the text.By introduction, Xu's relevant researchs and materials are paralleled, which gave new conception for further study and the orientation of this thesis. Chapter1 is about the history of Xu herself and her collection of poems, talking over the birth and death date of Xu which is still an unsettled problem and the original edition and the successors of the collection and how it spread. Chapter2 is for the circumstances which produced Xu's poetry. The living and creating condition of those genius ladies can be sketched from the representative Xu's works according to the literary tendency in the district of central Wu and the intercourse and exchange of those ladies in the late Ming Dynasty. Chapter3 analyses the self-appearance and feminine conscious in Xu's poems. Chapter4 gives a description of the art features and characteristics of Xu's poetry by close reading through her collection.The part of End sums up the whole thesis and tries to make a brief depict of the condition of the feminine conscious in women's writings which sprang up into an eruption in the late Ming Dynasty and gradually came to declination afterwards by the check of the later collections where Xu's poems can be found.What the writer intends to do is to interpret the value and the meaning of women writing at the beginning of the rising group of women writer in Ming and Qing Dynasties, and somehow throw a light on the study of those women writer and particularly research of individuals.