Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women's Biography in Chinese History (New Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society)

This volume develops new strategies for reading, contextualizing, and interpreting the long Chinese tradition of women's biography. Drawing upon a vast array of sources, from formal biography to poetry, letters, and oral interviews, the authors examine how women's biography served particular cultural, political, and world-making projects, and how it illuminates these projects in new ways by highlighting tensions within and between them.