Automathographical Traces in Wang Zhenyi’s Travel Poetry

Abstract

This paper examines the intellectual and literary work of Wang Zhenyi (1768–1797)—mathematician, astronomer, and poet of the Qing dynasty—within the broader landscape of premodern Chinese women’s scholarship. Although Wang Zhenyi is occasionally referenced in popular and reference accounts, sustained engagement with her writings remains limited. Situating her work within the rich intellectual cultures of late imperial China, the paper reads Wang Zhenyi’s travel poetry as a form of automathography, understood here as a mode of life writing in which mathematical reasoning, poetic form, and embodied experience are co-constituted. Drawing on narrative rhythmanalysis, the paper advances a life writing approach attentive to the temporal, affective, and kinetic rhythms through which thinking unfolds and selves are formed. Movement across landscapes, pauses, repetitions, and returns are analysed as epistemic gestures that bind observation, calculation, and self-formation. By tracing these automathographical rhythms across Wang Zhenyi’s poetic itineraries, the paper intervenes in life writing scholarship by extending automathography beyond retrospective autobiographical narratives and demonstrating how mathematical lives can be written across genres, through poetic and paratextual forms. In doing so, it offers a conceptual framework for reading intellectual self-formation as a rhythmic, distributed, and relational process.