Female ethnotype in the lyrical songs of ‘Shijing’ (11th-6th centuries BC) and in the narrative prose of medieval China

Abstract

The aim of the study is to show that the prose works by the Tang dynasty writers reflected the new ethnotype of Chinese women, formed in the minds of the Chinese during this period. The study is original in that it is the first in Russian sinology to carry out a comparative analysis of female images in ancient and medieval Chinese literature. In the songs of the ancient Chinese poetic collection ‘Shijing’, the portrait included not only descriptions of women, but also a list of moral qualities and less often the behavior of the heroines, but did not touch upon their character traits. The authors of short stories of the Tang dynasty refuse to describe heroines’ appearance and expand the circle of female characters, adding celestials and foxes who take the form of a woman. The results have shown that in medieval literature, the description of a heroine’s appearance played an insignificant role and most often amounted to using the epithet ‘beauty’ without paying attention to the details adopted in archaic literature. The problem of the relationship between the descriptions of details in heroines’ portraits and their character traits and behavior is discussed. As a result, it has been proved that in the prose works under study, priority is given to the moral qualities of female characters, which indicates the influence of Confucian ideology on the authors during the period under consideration.