This dissertation has examined the tanci fiction Jing zhong zhuan, or A Biography of Dedication and Loyalty, authored by a gentry woman writer Zhou Yingfang in the late nineteenth century. I argue that by adapting the well-known patriotic story of General Yue Fei in Chinese history, Zhou Yingfang suggests new directions in grand historical narrative in her own voice and from her own perspective. Negotiating the writing conventions of earlier legends, she turns the stereotyped masculine image of Yue Fei into a hero in both public and domestic settings. In addition, she adds many detailed episodes from Yue Fei's family life and portrays virtuous women in a chaotic historical period, paralleling the conventional narration of wars and politics. Although often (mis)read as a text that inspires nationalism, Jing zhong zhuan actually redefines significant values in late imperial China, including the importance of family and the complex relation between filial piety and political loyalty. The tanci also enriches the notions of female virtues, expanding them from chastity to beauty, learning and management skills. Employing tanci, a unique genre that is closely associated with and quite dominated by women, Zhou Yingfang demonstrates her gendered consciousness in relationship to late nineteenth-century Confucian family dynamics and her self-representation and literary engagement within grand historical narratives. My dissertation sheds light on the dynamics between women's writing and historiography, as well as on the discourses of patriotism and emerging nationalism at the turn of the twentieth-century in China.

This dissertation has examined the narrative genre of tanci in late imperial China while keeping a close eye on the theme of women's self-empowerment. I have analyzed three voluminous tanci works, Destiny of Rebirth; Dream, Image, Destiny; and A Histoire of Heroic Women and Men, respectively published in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. I have proposed that these tanci works, by depicting women's crossdressing, self-portraits, and homoerotic sensitivities, presented a transgressive potential to disrupt dominant social and cultural discourses of womanhood in late imperial China. Particularly, tanci works present women who leave their cloistered lives and travel while crossdressed as men. These women are the very opposite of the Confucian feminine ideal (the filial, chaste, and obedient woman who follows the prescribed codes required of a daughter, wife, and widow). Writing such challenging stories was itself a transgressive act for late imperial women authors, whose literary practices were under strict social regulation in the patriarchal society. For women readers of the time and for those of the contemporary period, reading these stories was and is an empowering experience. By identifying with the heroic protagonists, historical and contemporary readers alike may be inspired to envision a life of autonomy and freedom outside the domestic space. Tanci works, I propose, validate women in their immediate historical and cultural landscapes and project rich possibilities for women to reform social reality. The historical task of contemporary readers of tanci is therefore three-fold: to retrieve the voices of earlier authors from obscurity, to empower themselves with the help of these voices, and to integrate the predecessors' insights into a vision of new possibilities of social change.