This talk is part of the Center for East Asian Studies
CHINA BROWN BAG SERIES
In the available histories of Chinese literature today, early and mid-Ming literature-i.e., literature from c.1400 to c. 1550-- has been largely ignored. In Europe, this period was known as the Renaissance during which a great revival of interest in classical literature occurred. However, our strange obsession with the late Ming (c. 1550-1644) has led us to ignore some equally important, if not more important, literary phenomena occurring in the earlier part of the Ming. Thus, this lecture will focus on early and mid-Ming by showing the richness of the literary culture of the period.
The speaker, Kang-i Sun Chang was born in Beijing and grew up in Taiwan. She immigrated to the U.S. in 1968 and received her Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1978. Since 1982 she has been Professor of Chinese Literature at Yale University. Her scholarly publications include The Evolution of Chinese Tz'u Poetry (Princeton, 1980), Six Dynasties Poetry (Princeton, 1986), and The Late Ming Poet Ch'en Tzu-lung: Crises of Love and Loyalism (Yale, 1991). She is the co-editor (with Ellen Widmer) of Writing Women in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1997), and the compiler and co-editor (with Haun Saussy) of Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford, 1999). She is also the co-editor (with Stephen Owen) of the Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (forthcoming). In addition, she has published several books and numerous articles in Chinese on literature and society, religion, gender studies, cultural theory and aesthetics. Over the years she has won many awards, prizes and honors-including Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, the ACLS Fellowship in Chinese Studies, NEH grant, Yale's Griswold Research Award.