钱南秀

    OBITUARY FOR NANXIU (11-17-22)
    Nanxiu QIAN, a bright light in so many lives, passed away peacefully at the age of 75, on November 16, 2022 in Houston, Texas, after a long struggle with cancer. Nanxiu was born on June 18, 1947 in Nanjing, China to Ziming Qian and Lin Zhou. She is survived by her son, Liang Zhu, Liang’s wife, Chen Xu, his daughter, Emma Linfeng Zhu; Nanxiu’s sisters, Manqian Qian, Jujing Qian, Zengyue Qian; her brothers, Dawei Qian and Dajing Qian; her nephews, Yangyang Qian, Tiaotiao Qian, Zhuo Wang, and Hua Ning; and her nieces, Jun Xie, Li Ning and Mengke Xu.
    Nanxiu, it seemed, could do everything. She was a devoted mother and grandmother, an outstanding scholar of Chinese literature, an excellent poet and calligrapher, and a prize winning short-story writer, teacher and translator. She had a beautiful singing voice which enabled her to chant traditional Chinese poems with remarkable, soul-touching effect.
    Nanxiu was educated at Nanjing University, where she obtained an MA degree in Classical Chinese Literature (1982), and where she taught from 1981–1986. In the late 1980s, she came to the United States to study in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where she received her doctoral degree in 1994. Her Ph.D. dissertation became her first book, Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yü and Its Legacy (Honolulu: the University of Hawaii Press, 2001).
    From 1993 to 2022, Nanxiu taught Chinese literature at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her primary affiliation was with the Department of Transnational Asian Studies, but she was also active in the Chao Center for Asian Studies, the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and Medieval Studies. No one at Rice during her time paid more attention to nurturing undergraduate students, and few, if any, faculty could match her broad-ranging service to the University.
    She team-taught several courses with members of the History Department and the Art History Department, and organized and obtained funding for several major academic meetings in the US and abroad––most recently an NEH.-sponsored international conference at Rice in 2017 that yielded two volumes, for which she was the principal editor: Rethinking the Sinosphere: Poetics, Aesthetics, and Identity Formation (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2020) and Reexamining the Sinosphere: Cultural Transmissions and Transformations in East Asia (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2020)
    Her research in Chinese, Japanese and Western languages gave her scholarship particular breadth, depth and analytical rigor. She had a penetrating intellect, and the topics that interested her ranged widely. She wrote gracefully in both Chinese and English. In the West, she was best known for her pioneering and much-cited work on the enormously influential fifth-century Chinese masterpiece Shishuo xinyu (A New Account of Tales of the World), but she also wrote extensively on a great many other Chinese literary works spanning some two thousand years, from the Lienü zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women; first century BCE), to twentieth century fiction in Taiwan, and gender studies in contemporary American China Studies.
    Her last single-authored book was Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), a highly regarded political and literary biography of a remarkable woman scholar in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China. Among Xue’s many achievements, her collection of the life stories of more than 200 “exemplary” foreign women demonstrated to Chinese readers, in Nanxiu’s words, how these individuals “carved their self-invented space within the male-dominated world.”
    Nanxiu also wrote dozens of stimulating articles, essays and book chapters in Chinese and English, wrote or co-authored several books in Chinese, and co-edited several conference volumes in both English and Chinese, including Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2008), Zhongguo wenxue: Chuantong yu xiandai de duihua (Chinese Literature: Conversations between Tradition and Modernity (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2007), and Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
    But above all, and this is the true measure of a life, Nanxiu was a truly wonderful person. Everyone who knew her enjoyed, respected and admired her. She was extraordinarily generous with her knowledge and her time, kind to everyone, and full of vitality, wit and good humor.
    She will be sorely missed.
    

    ——by Professor Richard Smith, Rice University
    

    唁　電
    

    遽聞錢南秀先生駕返瑤池，南京大學文學院師生驚心震悼，不勝哀惋！
    錢先生青年時代成長於南京，1978年於南大中文系攻讀“中國文學史”碩士學位，1981年畢業後留校工作多年。所擔任課程如“古代文學作品選”多美譽令績，與我院師生情誼深厚。
    上世紀九十年代，先生赴美國耶魯大學深造，後任萊斯大學亞洲研究中心中國文學教授。先生雖移席異域，仍心念舊鄉，可謂“中心藏之，何日忘之”。多年來始終牽掛母校發展，於我院人才培養、學術研究、國際交流合作諸端竭誠助益，不遺餘力。2017年先生與域外漢籍研究所在美國休斯敦合開“重思漢文化圈”國際學術會議，將南大的東亞文明研究推廣到歐美學界，可謂古道熱腸，令人難以忘懷。
    先生積學勤勉，學殖深厚，兼中國東南學派校讎考據之長，與美國耶魯大學新批評派之優，融貫中西文學研究，形成獨具個人特色之學術格局。先生精於魏晉南北朝文學、女性與性別、漢文化圈諸領域之研究，其所論著皆視野廣闊、別開生面，深獲學界好評，啟迪後學者甚多。
    徽音頓渺，懿範垂型，錢南秀先生千古！
    

    南京大學文學院　敬輓
    2022/11/18
    

    痛悼南秀学长
    

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    张伯伟　曹虹　敬挽
    

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