Yuefan (Ivy) Wang

My interdisciplinary dissertation, “Written Gardens Revisited: Gender and Women’s Garden Poetry in Late Imperial China,” unites two stands of significant phenomenon in late imperial China: the newfound popularity of garden literature, and an unprecedented prominent tension between the male-dominated tradition of garden writing and the feminized nature of the garden space. Combining the methodologies of archival research and textual analysis from the fields of literature, women and gender studies, history, art history, and landscape architecture, this study explores how garden poetry enabled gentry women from the 17th to the late 19th centuries to produce poetic spaces for multiple purposes and eventually carve a place for women’s voice in the subgenre of Chinese literature. It reveals that garden poems present multifaceted aspects of late imperial women’s changing lives and shed light on their experiences, roles, and aspirations. Many poems discussed in this study are translated into English and analyzed for the first time. Moreover, studying Chinese garden literature, through a gender lens, not only promotes the repositioning of women in world literature but also helps reveal the fullness of designed landscapes in cultural expression. This study has been awarded the 2023 School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics Dissertation Completion Fellowship.