Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Note on Translations of Chinese Titles -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I In the Domestic Realm -- Chapter One Writing and Illness: A Feminine Condition in Women's Poetry of the Ming and Qing -- Chapter Two Lamenting the Dead: Women's Performance of Grief in Late Imperial China -- Part II Larger Horizons: Editing and its Implications -- Chapter Three Retrieving the Past: Women Editors and Women's Poetry, 1636-1941 -- Chapter Four The Unseen Hand: Contextualizing Luo Qilan and Her Anthologies -- Chapter Five From Private Life to Public Performances: The Constituted Memory and (Re)writings of the Early-Qing Woman Wu Zongai -- Part III Beyond Prescribed Roles -- Chapter Six Women Writers and Gender Boundaries During the Ming-Qing Transition -- Chapter Seven Chan Friends: Poetic Exchanges Between Gentry Women and Buddhist Nuns in Seventeenth-Century China -- Chapter Eight War, Violence, and the Metaphor of Blood in Tanci Narratives by Women Authors -- Part IV The Personal is Political: Responding to the Outside World -- Chapter Nine The Lady and the State: Women's Writing in Times of Trouble during the Nineteenth Century -- Chapter Ten Imagining History and the State: Fujian Guixiu (Genteel Ladies) at Home and on the Road -- Chapter Eleven Xue Shaohui and Her Poetic Chronicle of Late Qing Reforms -- Conclusion -- Literary Authorship by Late Imperial Governing-Class Chinese Women and the Emergence of a "Minor Literature" -- The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming through Qing and its Deliberations on a "Minor Literature" -- About the Contributors -- Bibliography -- Index.