Sentimentalism and the “Cult of Qing”: Writing Romantic Love in 18th-Century England and Late Ming China

Abstract

This essay analyzes a crucial difference in the ways in which erotic feelings are articulated in the sentimental novel from eighteenth-century England and Feng Menglong’s stories of qing from late Ming (1573–1644). It compares Feng’s stories and Samuel Richardson’s novels with a focus on how they chart the courses of love affairs. The essay argues that English sentimental novels accentuate psychological depth while their Chinese counterparts preclude depth with ritualized expressions of feelings. The contrast goes a long way to explaining the bifurcation of English and Chinese fiction in modern eras; one gives rise to several nuanced forms of psychological realism, modulating narrative perspectives as a way of mimicking the complex workings of layered consciousness. The Chinese stories of qing, on the other hand, suggest a different theory of love, one that downplays subjective control of feelings in favor of the effects of social or accidental circumstances. They evolve into a fictional tradition that aestheticizes and stylizes qing, reducing it to a surface of fixed patterns by virtue of inserting verse pieces into prose narratives.