Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction by Li Guo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction by Li Guo Christopher Lupke (bio) Li Guo. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. Purdue UP, 2021. 273 p. The Chinese literary genre tanci 彈詞, a prosimetric form that mixes fictional narrative with poetry of various sorts, has been referred to in English translation as chantefable, plucking rhyme, or simply by its original Chinese term tanci or tanci fiction. It emerged in the late imperial era as the preferred medium of expression for literate women in China. Its mixed storytelling and singing structure suggests that it evolved out of an oral tradition. Long overlooked or dismissed as middlebrow, it has received little scholarly attention until recent decades. But in the past 30 years, and especially recently, it has attracted much serious scholarship, such as the Chinese-language book-length work of Hu Siao-chen, studies by Mark Bender, Maram Epstein, Yu Zhang, Lingzhen Wang, and others, as well as by Li Guo, this volume's author, her second on the topic of tanci. Guo's book comprises a lengthy, informative and sophisticated introduction, five main chapters--each devoted to the study of one tanci work—and a brief conclusion. As Guo indicates, the Chinese bibliographer Sheng Zhimei asserts that 538 novel-length tanci survive down to the present. Guo's rationale for selecting the five on which she focuses is to choose significant tanci that have received little to no scholarly attention in English. Of these five, one exists only in a handwritten manuscript in the Shanghai Library. Another has only recently been discovered, and Guo's discussion is its first such scholarly treatment in English. Having devoted her graduate research and first book to tanci, Guo presents these five tanci with the authority of a true expert—one of the leading scholars on the topic in the world. Her intimate understanding of the genre as a whole, her theoretical sophistication, and her exhaustive analysis of these five texts makes Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction an exemplary work of scholarship and a significant intervention into world feminist literary studies. It will be of great interest to any scholar who is curious about the development of literature written by women in Chinese but who does not have a knowledge of Chinese, and will assist Chinese [End Page 139] Studies scholars unfamiliar with the genre as well. It is not merely that tanci are mainly written by women. The themes of the narratives are deeply informed by the concerns of women and their status in late imperial China at a time when the onslaught of the Taiping and other rebellions, as well as the imperialist incursion of such military powers as the British, were posing a major threat to the millennia-long dynastic system and governmental structure. Additionally, the texts reflect the emergence of nascent global capitalism. Given these stresses, it stands to reason that the unprecedented social problems that Chinese people were confronting would surface in literature. Within these texts, traditional notions of gender roles, the established system of patriarchal kinship, as well as the relationship between subject and state were all called into question. And yet, as Guo demonstrates, the texts were doubly inscribed, which is to say that while genuinely subversive elements were at the center of these texts, they also depicted characters who ultimately returned to the fold, seeking readmission to the heteronormative hierarchies from which they initially strayed and rebelled. Among the theoretical reasoning that she draws upon, Guo turns to the notion of "spatialization" pioneered by Susan Friedman, who developed her ideas out of the writings of Julia Kristeva and Mikhail Bakhtin. "Spatialization" works on two axes, a horizontal and a vertical one. Guo sees Friedman's theory as fashioning a "horizontal" relationship between writer and reader and a "vertical" line in the space and time that the reader occupies. Space indeed does play a crucial role in most tanci, which frequently feature a woman who, in the disguise of a man, ventures out into the external world, leaving the domestic sphere behind. Guo also engages Nancy Armstrong's classic cornerstone essay "The Rise of Feminine...