ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how women’s authorship in music prints were presented and canonised through carefully constructed editorial rhetoric in early modern China. The presentation of such authorship was a way of tackling dispute and doubt about female authorship in songwriting and music publication among elite male writers and critics. The chapter explores, in particular, how the Chinese women’s song anthology, the Collection of Elegance (1667), can be seen as a patchwork of late Ming culture and gender dynamics in the public distribution of female-authored song. It focuses on the female editor Wang Duanshu (1621–c.1701) and her editorial approach of holding on to the late Ming (1573–1644) music legacy as self-expression of editorial authority.
Drawing on materialist methodology from literary historians in print culture studies of both early modern England and China, this chapter offers a close reading of the text and paratexts of the Collection of Elegance, as edited by Wang. It deals in some detail with the material design and conceptualisation of authorship, and offers new ways of thinking about material histories of music-textual production in early modern China. The chapter examines the collection in detail, tracing structural, ordering and editorial strategies, and seeks to understand how those strategies relate to broader cultural-historical trends in the period.
