Böcker av Wai-yee Li

Sima Qian (first century BCE), the author of Record of the Historian (Shiji), is Chinas earliest and best-known historian, and his Letter to Ren An is the most famous letter in Chinese history. In the letter, Sima Qian explains his decision to finish his lifes work, the first comprehensive history of China, instead of honorably committing suicide following his castration for deceiving the emperor. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some scholars have queried the authenticity of the letter. Is it a genuine piece of writing by Sima Qian or an early work of literary impersonation?The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qians Legacy provides a full translation of the letter and uses different methods to explore issues in textual history. It also shows how ideas about friendship, loyalty, factionalism, and authorship encoded in the letter have far-reaching implications for the study of China.

Wai-yee Li examines the discursive space of women in seventeenth-century China. Using texts written by women or by men writing in a feminine voice, as well as writings that turn women into signifiers of lamentation or nostalgia, Li probes the emotional and psychological turmoil of the Ming-Qing transition and subsequent moments of national trauma.

What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation.