Biographical Approach

Another significant component of our project is the biographical research of Xu Yezhao. In order to better understand different texts provided on this website, one efficient approach is to learn more about the author herself. We were about to search more on Xu’s life experiences and personal information, but the resources we had access to were very limited. The first and the most significant site we referred to was the database of Ming Qing Women's Writing in McGill, and it was also where we gained access to the original texts of the two essays in this website. In addition, we consulted various types of online libraries, including Duxiu, CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure中國知網), WorldCat, and Google Scholar for research. We looked up mostly books written by Chinese scholars, focusing on classic Chinese writings and critiques, and scholars writing in English, focusing more on the specific genre of female writing. We encourage anyone viewing this website to refer to the references of our introduction to Xu (page “Xu Yezhao”) and find out any books or articles they are interested in. We would also be grateful if people could inform us of any new resources we can look at to discover more about Xu.