How Studying Li Qingzhao Changed My Understanding of Chinese Literary History

The Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies presents a workshop on female Chinese poet Li Qingzhao.

Ronald Egan
Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures

This talk grows out of research on Li Qingzhao conducted over the past ten years and a book-length study that emerged ever so slowly from it.  The talk discusses the issues raised by the existence of this supremely talented woman poet in a time when (unlike the Ming-Qing era) there was no community of women writers.  The hostility Li Qingzhao faced as a woman venturing into the overwhelmingly male domain of letters may be glimpsed often in what she wrote and what early critics wrote about her.  In later centuries she continued to be a controversial figure, as the critical tradition struggled to accommodate her.  The conflict in her reception history between literary merit and ideals of womanly conduct came to a head in the Qing dynasty.  The Qing resolution of that conflict, which strikes us as disingenuous today, was effected by leaders of the school of “evidential scholarship.” Theirs was the view of Li Qingzhao that was universally accepted in the Republican Period and written into the earliest national histories of Chinese literature, composed then.  Its influence is abundantly present even today in Chinese (as well as English) writings about Li Qingzhao.  The talk reflects upon some larger issues the case of Li Qingzhao raises about the power of the critical tradition to recast gifted writers in its own image and the exclusivity of Chinese poetic and literary culture of the middle and late imperial periods.