Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform

This book examines the late Qing reforms from the perspective of the woman writer Xue Shaohui and her reform-minded colleagues, and thus offers a different and more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the reform era than any previous work, showing in particular that late Qing women reformers were not merely passive objects of male concern, but rather active, optimistic, autonomous, and self-sufficient agents of their own reform ideals.