SOURCE: Wixted, John Timothy. “The Poetry of Li Ch'ing-chao: A Woman Author and Women's Authorship.” In Voices of the Song Lyric in China, edited by Pauline Yu, pp. 145-68. Berkeley and Los Angeles, Cal.: University of California Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Wixted examines Li Ch'ing-chao's place in the Chinese literary tradition before exploring questions about the existence of a feminine consciousness in her writing.

The poetry of Li Ch'ing-chao (b. 1084)¹—both her tz'u and shih—prompts fundamental questions when viewed from various twentieth-century Western perspectives, especially feminist ones. Is there a separate women's literary tradition in China? If so, what is her place in it? Has her corpus of writings been viewed as being specifically female, and has it been viewed differently by men and by women? Is there a distinct female consciousness operative in her writing as well as that of other women writers? In what...