Xiaoxuan Li is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Studies, specializing in women authors of early modern China (late 16th to early 18th century).
Her dissertation, Resentment within Daydreaming: A Quest for Public Visibility by the Women of the Ye Family in the Late Ming, examines the writings of Shen Yixiu 沈宜修 (1590–1635), a female author who lived during the social and political upheavals of the late Ming period. While Shen’s works are often characterized by "much language of resentment 多作恨語," this study argues that her engagement with the theme of resentment was a deliberate literary strategy aimed at securing public recognition and positioning herself within the cultural, social, and ideological currents of her time.
The late Ming period witnessed the emergence of what Timothy Brook terms the “gentry society,” in which male elites, retreating from the traditionally defined state-centered public sphere, reconstituted a localized public discourse to maintain influence through cultural, social, economic, and political resources. Parallel to this shift, women’s literary participation not only expanded their presence in the literary world but also contributed to the formation of what Dorothy Ko describes as “women’s culture,” which gained recognition within this newly defined public sphere. Female gentry members thus found opportunities to renegotiate the boundaries between the “inner” and “outer” spheres. In Shen Yixiu’s case, her sustained focus on resentment (hen 恨) functioned as a means to evoke empathy from her contemporaries, particularly among gentry members grappling with the uncertainties of the late Ming. Through this literary engagement, Shen’s textual agency was transformed into social agency, actively contributing to the broader formation of gentry society.