Abstract
In Chinese historical writing before the twentieth century, the genre of biography included several distinctive forms, of which the two most common were the standard biography (zhuan) and the chronological biography (nianpu). In addition, epitaphs, either in the style of tomb epitaph (muzhiming), grave notice (mubiao) or sacrificial ode (jiwen) also provided information, sometimes in great detail, about a person’s life.1 The standard or official biography became a staple literary form in imperial China. These were highly formal, and whatever anecdotes they did feature were often stereotyped and might even be false. This genre of life writing was intended to reveal the character of the person, because the entire purpose of biography in traditional historiography was didactic: the subject’s success (or failure) was an illustration for future generations to follow, or as the case may be, to avoid. The emphasis was on a person’s virtue and, most commonly, how that virtue related to administrative success.2
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Notes
Women were not excluded from epitaph writing. Recent analyses of Tang era epitaphs written specifically for women include the studies by Josephine Chiu-Duke, ‘Mothers and the Well-being of the State in Tang China’, Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 8.1 (2006): 55–114
Yao Ping, ‘Good Karmie Connections: Buddhist Mothers in Tang China’, Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 10.1 (2008): 57–85.
For references in Western languages that focus on Chinese biographical writing, see those publications discussed in Harriet Zurndorfer, China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works about China Past and Present (Leiden: EJ. Brill, 1995), 137–141.
Susan L. Mann, ‘AHR Roundtable: Scene-setting: Writing Biography in Chinese History’, American Historical Review 114.3 (2009): 637
Bret Hinsch, ‘Review Article: The Genre of Women’s Biographies in Imperial China’, Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 11.1 (2009): 103.
Chen Shaotang, Wan Ming xiaopin lunxi (Discussion and analysis of late Ming ‘xiaopin’) (Hong Kong: Bowen shuju, 1980), 36–38.
Jamie Greenbaum, Chen Jim (IS58-1639): The Background to, Development and Subsequent Uses of Literary Personae (Leiden: Brill, 2007)
Old Yasushi, ‘Textbooks on an Aesthetic Life in Late Ming China’, in Daria Berg and Chloe Starr, eds., The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 179–187.
Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 112
Tang Xiaobing, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 206.
Republished in Liang Qichao, Yinbing shi heji: wenji (Writings from the ice-drinker’s studio: collected works), vol. 1 (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936), 119–120.
Hu Ying, ‘Naming the First ‘New Woman’’, in Rebecca Karl and Peter Zanow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), 180.
Joan Judge, ‘Blended Wish Images: Chinese and Western Exemplary Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 6.1 (2004): 118–124.
Susan L. Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 222–224.
Ellen Widmer, ‘The Rhetoric of Retrospection: May Fourth Literary History and the Ming-Qing Woman Writer’, in Milena DoleŽelová and Old?ich Král, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 193–221.
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Wang Lingzhen, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Early Twentieth Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
Richard C. Howard, ‘Modern Chinese Biographical Writing’, four-??? of Asian Studies 21A (1962): 472.
Harriet Zurndorfer, ‘China and “Modernity”: The Uses of the Study of Chinese History in the Past and the Present’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40.4 (1997): 473–476.
Xu Weiyu, ‘Hao Lan’gao (Yixing) fufu nianpu’, (Chronological record of Hao Yixing and his wife) Qinghua xuebao (Qinghua Studies) 10.1 (1936): 185–233.
Susan L. Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 196–197.
Iiang Qichao (Iiang Ch’i-ch’ao), tr. Immánuel C.Y. Hsü, Intellectual Trends in the Ch’ing Period (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 22.
Susan L. Mann, ‘Women in the Life and Thought of Zhang Xuecheng’, in Philip J. Ivanhoe, ed., Chinese Language, Thought, and Culture: Nivison and His Critics (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1996), 111.
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© 2013 Harriet T. Zurndorfer
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Zurndorfer, H.T. (2013). How to Write a Woman’s Life Into and Out of History: Wang Zhaoyuan (1763–1851) and Biographical Study in Republican China. In: Dryburgh, M., Dauncey, S. (eds) Writing Lives in China, 1600–2010. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137368577_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137368577_4
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