- 期刊
- OpenAccess
Bosom Friends in the Red Chamber: Women's Friendship Poetry in Late Imperial China
紅閨知己：明清時期的女性友誼詩歌
並列摘要
Friendship is gendered in literati discourse in dynastic China. In contrast to the large repertoire of stories, poems, and plays about male friendship, depictions of female friendship are scarce in classical male-authored Chinese literature. The silence on the subject of women's friendship in literati tradition was loudly contradicted in gentry women's poetry. In this article, I examine lyric poems on friendship exchanged between gentry women writers in China from the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. I propose a reading of these poetic writings as a sub-genre of friendship poetry and argue that women writers used this poetic venue to consolidate mutual interests with like-minded writers, to achieve imaginative self-realization, to revise definitions of femininity, and to create and develop a distinct female literary tradition.