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Ming, Qing, and Chosŏn Anthologies that Include Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn's Poems

After Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn's untimely death at the age of twenty-seven, her younger brother Hŏ Kyun collected all of her extant poems from her natal home, transcribed those he had memorized, and, in 1590, showed it to his Chinese teacher, Liu Chenglong 柳成龍, with the request that he compose a postscript. Although Liu's postscript was misplaced during the Hideyoshi invasions (1592-1598) and never published with the collection, the record of this episode provides strong evidence that manuscript copies of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn's poems were being circulated in both the Chosŏn and the Ming dynasties well before the first publication of the Nansŏrhŏn Jip 雪蘭軒集 in 1608 in Chosŏn.

The following table provides an important tool for tracing the circulation of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn's poetry in these dynasties, but especially in the Ming and Qing. While the same collection (Nansŏrhŏn Jip 雪蘭軒集) was published in three separate editions in seventeenth-century Chosŏn (1608, 1632, 1692), in China her poems were included to different extants in a wide variety of anthologies. The basic information about these anthologies is included below.

The paratexts, including prefaces, postscripts, brief biographies, and commentaries, are particularly useful for the part of our project that is exploring the creation and transmission of a place- and gender-specific cultural icon. Many of these texts are included in translation in "Biographical Accounts."

A number of recent careful studies of Nansŏrhŏn's legacy have been invaluable in the compilation of this material. These include "The actual situation of late Ming/early Qing documents that record the works of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn of Chosŏn 明末清初文獻所錄朝鮮許蘭雪軒作品之實況" by Pak Hyŏnkyu 朴現圭 in Zhang Hongsheng 張宏生 ed., Literature and Gender in Ming-Qing China《 明清文學與性別研究》; Hŏ Mija's Study of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, or Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn Yŏn’gu, and Kang-i Sun Chang's chapter, "Ming and Qing Anthologies of Women's Poetry and Their Selection Strategies," in Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, ed. Writing Women in Late Imperial China. Please refer to the bibliography for complete references.

2007 Columbia University