Top Ten Tuesday is a bookish meme originally created by The Broke and the Bookish and currently hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Each week there is a topic and participants list 10 books related to the topic.
This might be a bit of a niche topic, but this week’s top ten Tuesday is a freebie, so I decided to introduce some of the books I’ve used (and will use) for my research! I did my undergraduate in Korean studies and wrote my dissertation on women’s political and philosophical influence in premodern Korea, and I’m interested in exploring similar themes potentially in my master’s degree (which I start in September!!) but related to China. If you’re also interested in history, East Asia, women or any intersection of the three, then you might find some of the books on this list interesting! I tried to balance it between more academic texts and more accessible ones, so let’s go!
If you’re not super into history books then I recommend skipping to section three where I highlight some of the best biographies and travel writing-type classics by premodern women in East Asia!
Background Info
If you want to read anything more detailed about premodern East Asia, especially about women, you at least need a basic idea of what kind of a world the people writing these books or the people these books are talking about were living in. But no one wants to slog through thousands of pages of recollections of every battle to ever be battled, so here are a couple of short and accessible, academically rigorous but not academic introductions to Korean and Chinese history that have a sizeable section on the premodern period.
Writings About Women
These are books about women written by modern day authors, and they tend to be more on the academic side – but still worth a read if you can! Apart from Creative Women of Korea, the other two are actually both books that I’ve only briefly dipped into and still need to read more thoroughly.
Writing By Women
These are books that are actually written by premodern women themselves. First, a couple of more accessible biographies that I highly recommend for anyone even if you have no academic interest whatsoever because they tell some great stories. From Classical Writings of Korean Women – which is free! – I especially recommend Kim Keum-Won’s travelogue.
Then we have a couple of books that are more philosophical, including the classic Four Books for Women, which were the Confucian canon for women to study in both China and Korea. The book about Korean philosophers highlights c.18th philosophers, including one woman who mostly expressed her philosophical ideas through the equivalent of reminder texts to her husband.
Finally, the only book that I haven’t read at all here is The Red Brush, which is a collection of writings by Chinese women as well as (as far as I can tell) some academic discussion about the history and development of such writing.
And that’s it! A bit of an unusual topic, but I hope you enjoyed!
Question Time
Do you have any niche interests that you can recommend books about?
Keira x
Keira's Bookmark 