Transgression of Female Space and the Construction of Subjectivity in Tanci Fiction Anthologies from the Late Qing to the Early Republican Period

Tanci fiction, noted as a genre of narrative verse from the late Qing dynasty to the early Republican period offers a unique textual site for exploring the transformation of the "female space" in literature, tracing a trajectory from domestic fantasy to the enactment of female agency.This article examines *Liuhua Meng* (1841), *Bisheng Hua* (1857), *Zixu Ji* (1883), *Jingwei Shi* (1907), and *Yujing Tai* to analyze the literary representation of women transgressing their prescribed spatial boundaries.The progression spans from the "appropriative" occupation of male public spaces-often through the trope of cross-dressing-to a defiant withdrawal from the gender order (achieved through death or the refusal to resume female attire), and finally to the "elopement" or departure of women in late Qing and early Republican fiction, where spatial transgression shifts from mere narrative artifice to a form of real-world political mobilization.This study reveals that the transgression of spatial boundaries in *tanci* fiction is not simply a matter of "stepping out of the boudoir"; rather, it represents the evolution of female subjectivity-a transition from seeking glory within a male-defined framework to asserting one's own autonomous will.This process is shaped by the tension between the traditional "happy ending" convention inherent in *tanci* verse and the evolving expectations of its readership; it also reflects how early feminist discourse in the late Qing period permeated and transformed the literary genre traditionally associated with the domestic sphere.