Voicing the Feminine: Constructions of the Gendered Subject in Lyric Poetry by Women of Medieval and Late Imperial China

Love, literacy, and laments: themes of women writers in late imperial China

“…Maureen Robertson has written a sensitive study of the female subject in shi poetry, showing how women in late imperial times expanded the topical territory of the genre, and how they questioned and revised earlier images of women in the genre. [22] The ci form, the lyric or song lyric, originally referred literally to song texts that were set to musical tunes. The music of the ci has long been lost and forgotten, but there survive over 800 ci tunes called cipai, each of which has a set number of lines of uneven (but firmly established) length.…”