Intimate Memory: Mourning and Remembering Deceased Wives
in Late Imperial China
MARTIN W. HUANG
Professor, East Asian Languages & Literature
University of California, Irvine
May 6 4:00-5:30 @HSSB 4020
In late imperial China, the honor of being immortalized in a written text, traditionally reserved for a selective few, was becoming increasingly available to a larger section of the society. This paper examines the role played by the memorial writings on women authored by their husbands in this general “secularization” process Chinese biographical writings underwent during that time. It argues that when the biographer of a deceased woman and her grieving husband coincided in the same person and, especially, in moments of intense grief and deep personal guilt, the biographical narrative could be complicated considerably with the Confucian biographical conventions of the exemplary becoming more likely to be challenged, shedding light on aspects of late imperial gender relationships rarely revealed elsewhere.
Organized and sponsored by the East Asia Center, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies
Co-sponsored by the Comparative Literature Program & the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center?
