Sh i P oe t ry oF t He m i ng anD q i ng Dy na s t i e s 367As Stephen Owen has demonstrated so cogently in his seminal study, the auto-
biographical dimension in Chinese poetry was taken to a sophisticated height
early in the literary tradition by Tao Qian (365?–427) and later Du Fu.24 The train-
ing in and practice of shi and, later, ci poetry can be viewed as discursive regimes
that produced certain articulations of individual subjectivity in imperial China.
Even with the customary omission of personal pronouns in the Chinese poetic
language, the common assumption among writers and readers of shi poetry of
a “single unified lyric speaker”25—the poet’s persona and subjectivity—inform-
ing the poetic utterance ensured the development and persistence of a sig-
nificant personal and subjective dimension in poetry. It is not surprising that
poetry remained, for the majority of educated men and women, the most preva-
lent medium of self-representation. Situated in the present moment of inscrip-
tion, the poet, by articulating emotion or intellection (yanzhi) in response to a
wide range of experiences, both actual and textual, constructed and recorded a
multifaceted life history with an eye to a community of contemporary and future
readers that often included older versions of the authorial self, who would re-
read and sometimes revise particular poems or parts of poems, especially at the
time of publication. The material accumulation of this process of poetic inscrip-
tion over time was the making of the individual collection of poetry (bieji), which
could be edited, arranged in order, and molded into a loose and selective form
of self-narrative. As Owen has observed, since the ninth century, poets increas-
ingly undertook the editing of their own poetry collections, creating what he has
termed a “species of interior history,” “letting a life story unfold in the author’s
sequence of responses.”26
In the late imperial period, men and women alike exploited this textual means
for constructing a self-record that comprised lyrical moments of interior life,
situated in or juxtaposed to external, social occasional events. These records par-
ticipated in a highly formalistic and conventionalized “grammar” of poetic lan-
guage. As we have seen in previous chapters, a comprehensive repertory of the
basic forms and structures as well as the essential vocabulary and subgenres of the
two major genres of shi and ci had been developed by the Tang and Song periods.
Contextualized by titles, often also by prose prefaces and even interlineal explana-
tory notes by the poet, such poetic self-textualization constituted a quotidian pro-
cess that would continue as the author’s life progressed. In this practice, writing
poetry functioned in a way similar to keeping a diary or personal journal. When
the poems were collected and compiled into a chronologically sequenced whole,
the resulting text would embody a form of life history.
In poetry collections, the autobiographical narrative frame can be further re-
inforced by volume and chapter divisions that are named meaningfully, accord-
ing to stages in the self-narrative. I illustrate this autobiographical practice in the
exemplary poetry collection of Gan Lirou (1743–1819), a gentry woman of Feng-
xin County, in present-day Jiangxi Province, who lived in the era of peace and
prosperity referred to as the High Qing.27 I discuss the overall organization of her