Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice: The Abandoned Woman in Early Chinese Song Lyrics FROM THE PUBLISHER
Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice considers the effects on poetic voice of a conventional feminine persona - the abandoned woman - in early Chinese song lyric (ci) poems. The author reads the literary cross-dressing and ventriloquism of these mostly male-authored poems in light of the highly indeterminate Chinese poetic language. This study of persona and poetic voice will benefit scholars of lyric poetry in any language.
SYNOPSIS
Apparently revising her doctoral dissertation in Chinese literature for the University of Michigan, Samei explores gender, voice, and poetic persona by examining the aesthetic functioning of the conventionalized voice of the abandoned woman, especially in the work of male poets, but also in some anonymous popular songs, during the late Tang and Five Dynasties, roughly the ninth and tenth centuries. She is not concerned with the implications of this conventional feminine for literary notions of womanhood or for female writers, as previous scholars have been, but focuses on the effects of a gendered persona on various issues related to poetic voice and the question of who is speaking in the poems. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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