Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature: An Interview

Wai-yee Li’s recent book explores writing around the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, paying careful attention to the relationships of history and literature in writing by women, about women, and/or in a feminine voice. In a series of chapters that showcase exceptionally thoughtful, virtuosic readings of a wide range of texts, Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) considers how conceptions of gender mediate experiences of political disorder. We spoke about the book for the New Books in East Asian Studies podcast, and you can listen to that conversation here.