Exploring the Matter and Minds of Late Ming Dynasty Readers

Abstract

O hold a copy of an illustrated edition of a late Ming dynasty novel can be a moving experience for the aesthetically-sensitive reader. For one already thoroughly familiar with traditional Chinese culture, the almost weightless fascicle of such a volume might bring to mind marvelous thoughts on Chinese culture and fiction, while for one who knows little about things Chinese, it might raise a multitude of questions about the culture and literature that produced it. Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China by Robert E. Hegel is a first-rate, groundbreaking study that thoroughly answers the questions anyone holding a fascicle of illustrated Chinese fiction might have. One of C. T. Hsia’s dis t inguished s tudents , Robert Hegel , whose Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation is entitled Sui T’ang Yen-i: The Sources and Narrative Techniques of a Traditional Chinese Novel, has been teaching at Washington University at St. Louis since 1975. His earlier books are The Novel in Seventeenth Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) and Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature, edited with Richard C. Hessney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). In The Novel in Seventeenth Century China, besides presenting the historical and cultural background for China as it moved from the Ming dynasty, which ended in 1644, to the Qing, Hegel gives his readings of six novels published at that timel.1