Fiction's Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China

The Confucius Institute at the University of Oregon hosts a discussion of lives, works, and attitudes of the Zhan brothers in late Qing China

Ellen B. Widmer
Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies; Professor of East Asian Studies
Wellesley College

Zhan Xi (1850-1927) and Zhan Kai (1861?-1911?) were brothers from Quzhou in Western Zhejiang.   Both wrote novels in the late Qing, and in the novels of each one prominent theme was how to improve women’s lives.  We have other materials besides novels for both of these men.  As well, we have the poetry collections of their parents: mother Wang Qingdi (1828-1902) and father Zhan Sizeng (1832-94).  This study asks two questions.  First, what do the ancillary writings of the brothers and the parents add to our understanding of the novels, and second, can we link the mother’s less than fully happy life to the feminist leanings of the sons.

Ellen Widmer is the Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Wellesley College. Her research fields include Chinese women’s literature of the Ming and Qing dynasties, history of the book, missionary history, and traditional Chinese fiction and drama. She is the author of two monographs, The Margins of Utopia:  Shui-hu hou-chuan and the Literature of Ming Loyalism, 1987, and The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth Century China, 2006.  Her edited volumes includeWriting Women in Late Imperial China (with Kang-i Sun Chang), 1997; Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature (with Wilt Idema and Wai-yee Li), 2006; China’s Christian Colleges: Cross-Cultural Connections (with Daniel Bays), 2008; and The Inner Chambers and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming to Qing (with Grace Fong), 2010.  Her research is primarily in the areas of women, publishing, and fiction of the Ming and Qing.

Presented by the UO Confucius Institute for Global China Studies and cosponsored by the Department of East Asian Language and Literatures, CAPS Jeremiah Lecture Fund and the Asian Studies Program.