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492 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 developments. It is, however, a remarkably germane contribution, which helps the reader understand the complexities of the Chinese population. National identity and ethnicity are some ofthe strongest legitimizing factors underlying the Chinese state, and changes in this field may have enormous consequences. Dru Gladney's analysis is particularly useful since it does not draw any hasty conclusions , but keeps a sound, long-term perspective, founded in excellent scholarship. The chapter on "Rural China in Transition" by Huang Shu-min also maintains a long perspective, and describes rural development in broad strokes. Nancy Hearst's chronology is a very useful and highly selective overview of foreign relations and "dissident" events, interspersed with accounts ofpurely domestic phenomena. The glossary is useful for readers who have difficulty in keeping track ofthe many Chinese names and the specialist expressions relating to China. This volume is useful for those who need a reliable, up-to-date analysis of China. It is just what the businessperson, diplomat, or informed traveler needs while in China—and it is good and worthwhile reading for the China specialist who needs to be kept informed on current matters. Flemming Christiansen University ofManchester Dorothy Ko. Teachers ofthe Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth -Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. 395 pp. Hardcover $45.00. Paperback. $16.95. In Teachers ofthe Inner Chambers, Dorothy Ko celebrates several clusters ofliterary women who lived and wrote in the Jiangnan region (roughly Yangzhou to Hangzhou) during the long seventeenth century (roughly 1575 to 1725). Ko recovers for us a lost world of cultured women who fashioned emotionally rich lives, some embracing their roles as domestic women devoted to their families, others venturing out ofthe home to sell their paintings and writings and interact widely with circles ofliterary men and women. By bringing women's own voices , . to our understanding oftheir lives, she makes a major contribution to the study ofHawai'iPressofwomen in premodern China. In her introduction, Ko presents this book as a response to the twentiethcentury Chinese construction ofwomen in traditional China as victims of an un- Reviews 493 changing, oppressive, patriarchal system in which powerless women were treated like commodities. Her alternative vision is ofan elite women's world marked by change and strong affective bonds, a world in which women used their writing to carve out spaces for themselves within the Confucian family system and to negotiate and sometimes contest the conventional boundaries separating men's and women's spheres, thereby enlarging inherited notions ofwomanhood. Ko mentions several dozen women writers in this book—women who most often wrote poetry, but also women who wrote plays, essays, commentaries, or travelogues, or who edited other women's poetry. The range ofsources she uses is impressive, and includes many rare copies of these women's writings. She organizes her material by themes, sometimes coming back to the same woman in several chapters, so I found myselfhaving to make a chart to keep straight when and where each ofthe groups of creative women lived and the interconnections among them. To give a sense of the variety of the cases Ko offers, let me sketch the links among the major figures. The earliest case study involves friends active in Suzhou from about 1580, Xu Yuan (1560-1620) and Lu Qingzi, who, like almost all the women Ko discusses (except the courtesans), were born into highly educated families with jinshi degree holders. Exceptional in the case ofXu and Lu was the poetry they addressed to singing girls and courtesans and the sensual quality of the poems they addressed to these girls and to each other. About a generation later in Wujiang, farther south along Lake Tai, Shen Yixiu (1590-1635) created a literary family circle, sharing poems with her daughters , female cousins, nieces, and so on. About 1633, after two of her talented daughters had died young, she and her husband Ye Shaoyuan published their poems . It didn't take long for a copy of these poems to reach the hands ofthe adolescent Huang Yuanjie (ca. 1620-ca. 1669), then living a little farther south in Jiaxing with an elder brother who was studying for...

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