Literary Canon Formation and Historiography: The ‘Rediscovery’ of Ming–Qing Women’s Poetry

‘No nation has produced more anthologies or collections of women’s poetry than late imperial China’, according to Kang-i Sun Chang. Indeed, the open-access database of Ming–Qing Women’s Writings at McGill University Library includes 5239 women writers and 431 poetry collections. Yet virtually no trace of this phenomenon, or of these women writers, can be found in transcultural literary histories and anthologies of world literature published in the West in the twentieth century and beyond. How is this possible? The reason is not simply the lack of translations of many of the poems, but rather it has to do with the lack of canonization of these women poets in Chinese literary history until the late twentieth century, when they were ‘rediscovered’. This article investigates this neglect with the aim of showing that there were several different reasons for it, related to poetics, genre hierarchies, anthology editing practices, etc., in the imperial era, and to aspects of Chinese literary historiography in the twentieth century. Two women ci poets, Liu Shi and Qiu Jin, are briefly introduced to show that the reasons for their exclusion, as well as their later inclusion in the national literary canon, also need to be addressed on an individual level.