Intimate Memory: Gender and Mourning in Late Imperial China (SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture)

Sheds new light on pre-modern Chinese gender relationships in the context of marriage, male Confucian literati self-presentation, and social networks. In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memoirs, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies. Martin W. Huang is Professor of Chinese at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China. About the Author Martin W. Huang is Professor of Chinese at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 The Secularization of Memory The Perils of Intimate Memory The Changing Forms of Intimate Memory 2 Survivor’s Guilt 3 Hagiographical Memory From Biography to Hagiography From Hagiography to Historiography 4 Wounded Manhood An Autobiographical Memoir Father’s Oppressive Presence Emasculated and Trapped in the Feminine World Roaming/Wandering in Masculine Spaces The Manhood of a Loving Husband 5 Fragments of Anxiety 6 Remembering Concubines From the Biographical to the Autobiographical Self-Vindication and a New Aesthetic of Concubinage Mourning Concubine as Wife 7 Circulating Grief The Need to Quantify Grief A Self-Claimed Elegiac Master The Social Circulation of Grief The Spectacle of Grief The Displacement of the Mourned 8 Remembering Sisters Conflicting Identities and Obligations The Remarkable Epitaph of an Unremarkable Sister Unhappy Marriages The Bonding of Natal Family Reading Hagiography Too Literally Epilogue: A Wife’s Remembrances Notes Bibliography Index La 4e de couverture indique : "In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memories, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies." "In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memories, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies."--Page 4 of cover "In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memories, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies."--Back cover