To browse Academia. Ma Shouzhen was a cultured courtesan who lived in the famous pleasure quarter along the Qinhuai River in Nanjing, the southern capital of the Ming dynasty She was talented in dance and music, painting and poetry, and surprisingly for her time, she was also a playwright. Although she was a celebrity of the prolific Nanjing cultural milieu and there is a good corpus of extant material by and about her, the particular contribution of Ma Shouzhen - her character and her work - have been marginalised, or even neglected, by the previous scholarship.
This thesis is a cross-disciplinary study of Ma Shouzhen and is the first in-depth scholarly investigation into the entirety of her activities. It employs material and methods traditionally pertaining to the disciplines of sinology, history, art history, literary and drama studies. The thesis has a dual aim: first, to provide a nuanced understanding of the courtesan, her cultural production and social practice; second, Monica Merlin.
Mi Zhao. Daria Berg. This paper investigates perceptions of courtesans, gender and power from various perspectives, using both literary and non-literary sources and reconstructed lost books.
Analysis focuses on representations of the celebrated courtesan, poet and painter Xue Susu fl. In late Ming times women participated in elite culture in unprecedented numbers.
Courtesans gained prominence in the literati arts, playing a formative role in shaping cultural ideals. Late imperial Chinese discourse embeds the image of the courtesan in the formation of new beauty ideals and social negotiations of gender roles and power. Paradoxes abound, linking the courtesan with notions of chivalry, chastity and loyalism and depicting her in the context of national politics and warfare.
