Qing Literature Research Articles

The Daoist Art of the Bedchamber of Male Homosexuality in Ming and Qing Literature

The Daoist Art of the Bedchamber of Male Homosexuality in Ming and Qing Literature

What Remains of Mountains and Waters: Fragments, Mutilation, and Creation in Early Qing Literature and Culture

Abstract This article examines the discourse and representation of canshan shengshui (devastated landscape) in early Qing literature and culture through a focused interpretation of the works of Ming loyalists Zhang Dai (1597–1684) and Wang Fuzhi (1619–92). Connecting aesthetics with ethics, these authors symbolically translate the devastated landscape (aesthetically objectified) into ethical sites, namely, the mutilated body and the shattered psyche. They push beyond the orthodox discourse of canshan shengshui, which seeks to supplement the natural landscape with artistic representation and thereby re-create nature. Zhang and Wang stand as outliers of this tradition as they explore the nuances of creation through destruction—their symbiosis, the dark forces behind creation, and destruction beyond redemption. Their insights liberate the aesthetics of the devastated landscape from the immediate political context, evoke social and intellectual trends predating the dynasty's demise, and infuse new and lasting life into the writings of the loyalists.

A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China by Li Yu

Reviewed by: A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China by Li Yu Lenore Szekely (bio) Li Yu. A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China. Translated by Jing Shen and Robert E. Hegel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. xxv, 330 pp. Hardcover $75.00, isbn 978-02-31-19354-2. Paperback $25.00, isbn 978-02-31-19355-9. E-book $24.99, isbn 978-02-31-55036-9. The first of Li Yu’s (1611–1680) ten extant chuanqi plays to be translated into English, A Couple of Soles, makes a unique and significant contribution to Ming–Qing literature accessible to students and scholars. A play about acting, it continuously asks where the stage ends and reality begins. Tan Chuyu, a resolute scholar, condescends to become an actor to court an actress, the understated young beauty Fairy Liu. Tan’s intentions are frustrated by the unexpectedly strict rules against fraternizing among troupe members. As professionals, they can only play at romance for a profit. Doing it for free would betray the troupe’s code of conduct. The pair are able to realize their true roles as husband and wife onstage, until Fairy’s mother trades her for one-thousand taels to a corrupt local landowner to become his concubine. In its sensational play-within-a-play climax, Fairy publicly accuses her malefactors while performing her own revision of the Thorn Hairpin on a stage perched over the river before plunging to her death, with Tan racing to join her. The pair are transformed by divine intervention into a pair of sole fish, which gives the play its name, and are guided to the safety of retired official-turned-recluse Fisherman Mo’s net. Without revealing his former position for fear of being recalled to service, Fisherman Mo becomes Tan’s benefactor. The couple are married in a rustic wedding before Tan leaves to take the examinations, and earns the same official [End Page 299] post from which Fisherman Mo (formerly Murong Jie) has recently retired. Before escaping to reclusion, Murong defeated a bandit invasion. As Tan takes up his former post, Fisherman Mo pens him a guide to local governance, disguised as divine assistance to keep his former identity concealed. The half-human, half-beast bandit relaunches his attack and nearly succeeds by hiring an imposter to play the retired Murong. When he is recalled to government service to put down the bandit invasion, the imposter makes a treasonous retreat, deserting his troops and fleeing into reclusion. In the end, Tan is forced to try the real Murong Jie for the crime of his imposter, but Murong is finally saved from a sentence of death by Tan’s incorruptible pursuit of the truth. Having narrowly escaped this tragic conclusion, Tan Chuyu and Fairy Liu commit to joining Fisherman Mo and his wife to live out their days in a streamside retreat, free from the cares of the world. While Li Yu is known for his orientation toward performance, in English his vernacular fiction is better represented by Patrick Hanan’s delightful translations of Silent Operas (1990), A Tower for the Summer Heat (1998), and The Carnal Prayer Mat (1996). Despite chuanqi being an immensely popular form of entertainment in his day, and him being a widely known playwright, Li Yu’s contribution to the genre underlines the reasons why this translation of A Couple of Soles is so long awaited. Until now, in terms of full-length plays, chuanqi has been primarily represented in English by Chen Shih-hsiang, Harold Acton, and Cyril Birch’s 1976 translation of Kong Shangren’s Peach Blossom Fan, and Cyril Birch’s 1994 translation of Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion. While these two are undeniably masterpieces, they reflect trends that Li Yu worked against in his dramatic oeuvre. Peony Pavilion is fifty-five scenes and was immediately criticized for being difficult to set to music, lending itself to being performed in extract, and to being a desktop play. It also typifies late-Ming indulgence in sentimentality and emotion. Peach Blossom Fan is the prime example of the trend in early-Qing chuanqi to stage the...

Speaking in Tongues? Daimyo, Zen Monks, and Spoken Chinese in Japan, 1661–1711

The scholarly narrative of spoken Chinese studies in Tokugawa Japan is dominated by Ogyū Sorai, who founded a translation society in 1711 and urged Japanese intellectuals to learn contemporary spoken Chinese in order to draw closer to the language of the Chinese classics. This article explores the decades prior to this, when Sorai served the powerful daimyo Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu. By investigating Yoshiyasu's contact with Chinese monks and the surprising but previously untested claim that he could understand spoken Chinese, I explore the cultivation of spoken Chinese learning and the patronage of Chinese émigrés by members of Japan’s warrior elite in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Prior to the scholarly interest in vernacular Chinese and the popularity of Ming and Qing literature in Japan from the Kyōhō period (1716–35) onwards, Chinese orality served as a tangible link to the Chinese tradition for Yoshiyasu and other powerful daimyo, functioning as a sign of their fitness for power in East Asia.

The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre by Catherine Vance Yeh

Reviewed by: The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre by Catherine Vance Yeh Keith McMahon The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre by Catherine Vance Yeh. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. Pp. xii + 429. $59.95. The political novel in China has come and gone. It was a global genre that began in Europe during the 1830s, reached China by the late 1890s, and disappeared during the early 1900s after it had performed its mission. It is a particularly advantageous genre to study in a cross-cultural light because of its shared traits and conditions of creation. Readers will recognize what Catherine Yeh is talking about from their knowledge of late Qing literature, but Yeh has gone further than anyone else in placing these novels in a truly inclusive global context, as her discussions of the political novel in England, Italy, the United States, the Philippines, Korea, Japan, and elsewhere show. As a world genre, it played a fundamental role in the “general process of transcultural interaction” (p. 6). Here, Yeh refers to the fact that the space of these works was the entire world, not just a single country. The novels merged heroes from all lands and held key terms and concepts in common, such as globe, compatriot, comrade, public enemy, development, science, and humanity, to name only a few (p. 128). It is exciting to be able to combine two such fruitful lines of inquiry: identifying both the shared traits and the features specific to a cultural context. A primary shared trait is the genre’s focus on political and social crisis and its “projection of a way out” (p. 162). The Chinese version of the genre mainly appeared during the decade of reform that was proclaimed in 1901 after the Boxer Uprising. When the Qing court announced the need for institutional reform, it was seen as inviting a discussion. Writers of political novels, being part of “a newly forming class of urban intellectuals” (p. 173), responded. Having a vibrant urban-centered public sphere was crucial. In China, the most prominent site of this public sphere was the Shanghai International Settlement, where most of the novels were written and published. Numbers are difficult to calculate, but Yeh counts as political novels 48 of 202 novels published in the year 1907. The three issues receiving the most attention in China, and in varying degrees elsewhere, were (1) what the state and society could do, that is, the agency of the nation and its [End Page 592] citizens; (2) the quality of a nation’s citizens in terms of their ability to establish and adhere to a constitution; and (3) the emancipation of women. In China and elsewhere, the political novel was essentially conservative in that it advocated reform, not rebellion and overthrow, although there are characters who promoted the latter. Another shared belief among authors and other promoters of these novels was that the political novel could generate thoroughgoing transformation. The status quo was anathema. Furthermore, reform should proceed in rational and progressive fashion. Authors debated and spelled out methods, within a novel and in response to other novels, to newspaper editorials and other such platforms, and to court politics. The political novel gained cachet in China because it appeared in similar settings elsewhere, particularly in neighboring Japan, and presented arguments that were seen as having objective validity and not as simply imported from outside. The credibility and popularity of the genre, both in translation and when written originally in Chinese, helped catapult novels in general into a new phase in Chinese history. Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) used the word xin 新 (“new” or “reformed”) to refer to the novels because they made a clean break from those he dismissed as the traditional novel, a form that he proceeded to characterize and critique. Even the giant Story of the Stone (Honglou meng 紅樓夢) came under fire. Liang and others shunned the sentimental novels that wrote of scholars and beauties, now characterized as weak men and shackled women who wallowed in romantic attachments. The new hero, whether male or female, avoided such self-absorbed relationships and instead embodied intellectual acuity, political commitment, and superior moral fiber...

Scenic Depictions of Huizhou in Ming–Qing Literature

In the Ming through the Qing Dynasties, literary works captured Huizhou through scenic depictions of its mountains and rivers, villages, wealth, literary families, and portrayals of the local people. In these works, Huizhou men are described as virtuous, literary, and gallant while Huizhou women are often seen as knowledgeable, worldly, and industrious characters upholding the values of feudal society. By exploring such depictions of Huizhou, this article considers the way in which literary depictions correspond to historical reality, how scenes depicted in literature accord with the specific and various characteristics of a region, and the inextricable ties between scenic depictions in literature (wenxue tujing 文學圖景) and regional literature (diyu wenxue 地域文學).

Witness Outside History: Play for Alteration in Modern Chinese Culture

Witness Outside History:Play for Alteration in Modern Chinese Culture Yingjin Zhang (bio) Il y a toujours l'Autre. — Henri Lefebvre All of us must live within a certain historical era, but this era sinks away from us like a shadow, and we feel we have been abandoned. — Eileen Chang Modernity, Discontents, Witness Since the early 1990s, scholarship in the humanities has persistently interrogated modernity and explored its discontents and critiques. In the field of modern Chinese literature and culture, challenges to "enlightenment" (qimeng) as the core idea of modernity have been frequently mounted. In terms of historiography, David Der-wei Wang joins a group of mainland Chinese scholars1 and extends the parameters of the modern (xiandai) to the early modern period (jindai) by locating incipient modernities in late Qing literature (1849-1911), which is reconstructed as a vibrant literary scene of inventions and innovations that would be subsequently repressed or suppressed by the canonized May Fourth and leftist enlightenment discourses of the 1920s and1930s. "The crucial burst of modernity came in the late Qing, not the May Fourth period," Wang pronounces unequivocally.2 In terms of reconceptualization, Michel Hockx goes further than Wang and provocatively asserts that there is no "May Fourth literature," by which he means that there has never been such a coherent body of writings rigorously distinguished [End Page 349] from other competitors in China's burgeoning and contending literary field of the late 1910s through the late 1920s.3 In terms of methodology, Leo Ou-fan Lee advocates a paradigm shift from modernity as profound ideas—which he himself practiced back in the 1980s4—to modernity as surface images identifiable in an array of urban architecture and planning, print publications, consumer goods, and leisure lifestyles. As he proposes, "We must not neglect the 'surfaces,' the images and styles that do not necessarily enter into the deepest of thought but nevertheless conjure up a collective imaginary. In my view, 'modernity' is both idea and imaginary, both essence and surface."5 Modernity's discontents articulated in such new scholarship derive much from a realization of what Harry Harootunian calls "history's disquiet."6 What has come under intense interrogation in recent scholarship is the teleological concept of history, which has long been legitimated in the name of modernity and nationalism. Instead of promising progress and salvation without fail as before, history at the hands of the revisionist scholarship has re-emerged as a Janus-faced "monster" that repeatedly inflicted violence and trauma on generations of Chinese people living in different geopolitical areas throughout a long twentieth century.7 Inspired by Walter Benjamin's theory of history and memory, scholars nowadays openly declare their intentions to retrieve repressed memories and lost voices from the wreckage of history and historiography.8 The current fascination with unofficial memory may be one of the latest interventions in the ongoing project of what Prasenjit Duara aptly describes as "rescuing history from the nation,"9 in which the task of historiography is no longer exclusively reserved for the nation-state but is instead returned, at least theoretically, to countless experiencing subjects in history. Rather than a homogeneous people whose defense against imperialist invasions and whose triumph over internal enemies demand an unwavering, even self-sacrificial commitment to an imagined, oftentimes utopian community, the nation is now reconfigured in a de-centered landscape of the Chinese modern where the nation is increasingly detached from the heroic and immersed in the quotidian.10 From the textual recess of "May Fourth's discontents" and "wounded memories," a new oppositional stance can be located in "witness against history"—a stance that commands not only historical recognition but moral support as well.11 Recent critiques of modernity are largely empowered by poststructuralist thought, but a poignant irony remains that the binary logic allegedly placed under erasure has actually persisted to the present, albeit in a different rhetorical disguise. Reminiscent of a long list of contrasting terms (e.g., "struggle" versus "harmony," "strength" versus "beauty," "uplifting and dynamic" versus "placid and static," "powerful and grand" versus "prosaic and earth-bound"), enumerated by the young female writer Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920-95) in her polemic essay, "Writing...

Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature Zhu Mei (bio) Wilt L. Idema, Wai-yee Li, and Ellen Widmer, editors. Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2006. xi, 533 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0-674-01775-7. The early Qing was an extraordinarily creative and vibrant period in Chinese literary history. Among the studies that center on the traumatic experiences of Chinese intellectuals caused by the collapse of the Ming dynasty and the Manchu conquest of China, this volume is a pioneering one in the West. It is the fruit of two separate conferences sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute in June 2000 and June 2001. Before this volume, the study of early Qing literature in China focuses on how early Qing scholars and officials adjust their lives under a foreign regime. Moral evaluation and political attitudes toward the Qing government have been the fundamental standards to judge the literati's place in the history of literature. The contributors to this volume, the leading Western scholars in this field, quite convincingly have called for a comprehensive rethinking of the aesthetic and literary significance of the Manchu conquest reflected in the works of the most famous remnant subjects. Although the Ming-Qing transition as a historical event was almost an apocalyptic experience, characterized by unspeakable rupture, violence, and devastation, contributors to this volume see it as a period of cultural innovation and rupture of literary traditions, the birth of a new literary mode. With this new perspective and theoretical framework, I find it quite enlightening for the editors to chose "trauma and transcendence" as a theoretical sounding title. Idema, Li, and Widmer situate the literature of this period in trauma theory, at the intersection of poststructuralist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic theoretical approaches. At the same time, they pull it away from the moral-political interpretations that are commonly associated with it in China. Moreover, the capacity of language to articulate the experience of historical trauma is viewed as transcendence, which not only refers to a specific existential status but also relates to the cognitive faculty. Specifically, the transcendence examined in artistic and literary merits in literary works selected in this collection can be better termed "aesthetic transcendence." The twelve chapters in this volume and the introductory chapters on early Qing poetry, prose, and drama understand the writings of this era wholly or in part as attempts to recover from or transcend the trauma of the transitional years. Therefore, transcendence here can be understood as this volume's defining feature at two different levels: transcending traditional moral and political evaluation to aesthetic evaluation, a first layer; and a second [End Page 210] layer, exploring the way of transcending traumatic experience of dynastic transition from latter Ming to early Qing through literary works. The twelve chapters cover a range of literary genres that deal with "historical trauma and aesthetic transcendence." They are divided into three different sections: poetry, prose, and drama. Each part is preceded by a general introduction to the part as well as a more detailed introduction for each genre by an editor. Part 1 examines early Qing poets represented by Qian Qianyi, Wu Weiye, and Hanke. By investigating the depth of the poets' lyrical engagement with the historical crisis, the contributors to this volume attempt to reassess their place in the canon. Part 2 contains five chapters on fiction, memoirs, and other kinds of prose that offer as many approaches to modern readers' understanding of the transition between 1644 and 1700. Oki Yasushi focuses on the lives of Mao Xiang (1611-1693) and Yu Huai (1616-1696). Robert Hegel's "Dreaming the Past" is similarly concerned with the individual, focusing on Chu Renhuo (1630-1705). Ellen Widmer's study is also organized biographically, but it offers yet another perspective on Ming loyalist experience and can be taken as an exemplary study in this field. Widmer's chapter on Huang Zhouxing's prose is titled "Between Worlds: Huang Zhouxing's Imaginary Garden." Widmer points out that utopia in spirit, Jiangjiu yuan, is the imaginary subject of Huang's prose piece Jiangjiu yuan ji and other pieces such as his...

Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond (review)

Reviewed by: Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond Maram Epstein (bio) David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, editors. Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005. x, 620 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0–674–01781–1. It is unlikely that many people, other than reviewers, will read this massive collection of sixteen essays and introduction cover to cover. Several chapters do shed a diachronic perspective on how the late Ming legacy of trauma, memory, and nostalgia informed the imaginations of late Qing and postmodern writers, but most essays have a more limited reach in addressing specific late Ming or late Qing literary phenomena. However, this criticism in no way lessens my enthusiasm for the individual chapters, most of which make important contributions to late imperial fiction studies. Furthermore, it is refreshing that the editors have attempted to project a long, long view of Chinese literary development and have rejected the artificial divide that so frequently and even more unfortunately separates fiction written after 1900 from what came before. Rather than try to treat the volume as a whole, I will organize my review according to certain themes that emerge. Chief among these are the aesthetics of writing about traumatic loss and pain, and a genealogical uncovering of how women writers appropriated the traditional male roles of witness to and authors of history. How do writers take the somatic and irrational sensations of loss and turn them into the stuff of history, a mode of writing that in the modern period is associated with realism and the metanarrative of the nation? David Der-wei Wang's brilliant concluding essay, "Second Haunting," anchors and frames the themes of the anthology by focusing on the rootless ghost (gui 鬼), "that which returns" (gui 歸), as a metaphor for the psychic processes of nostalgia. Despite the attempts of May Fourth and socialist ideologies alike to drive away ghosts as politically incorrect expressions of superstition, ghosts have returned with a vengeance in the literature of the last two decades. These modern and postmodern revenants share with their imperial ancestors yearnings for a sense of stability and for a home and past that no longer exist. As Wang suggests, postmodern ghosts have further taken on the overlay of resistance to the modern, including the rejection of the politics and aesthetics of the modern nation and its physically invigorated citizens as well as the rejection of the ideological premises of realism and rationalism. Wang's essay neatly echoes themes raised by Judith Zeitlin in "The Return of the Palace Lady: The Historical Ghost Story and Dynastic Fall." As she argues, the present's backward gaze and desire for the past is masculine, while the yearned-for past is feminine (p. 156). She suggests that this might explain the prevalence of female ghosts who haunt stories about fallen dynasties. [End Page 579] One of the surprises of this bulky anthology is that the two lengthy chapters by Wai-yee Li and Judith Zeitlin cover much of the same material: the evolving literary treatment of late Ming beauties and what this says about changing views on the fall of the Ming, especially during the late years of the Qing. The editors would have done well to streamline the bibliographic information in both articles to avoid repetition. Wai-yee Li's "Women as Emblems of Dynastic Fall in Qing Literature" discusses the representations of late Ming women and the changing views on the relationship between the individual and larger historical processes. As the fall of the Ming became more historically and emotionally distant from Qing writers, they focused their efforts on manipulating the aesthetic and universal themes associated with these women's lives. The strength of this chapter is the close readings of the Chen Yuanyuan 陳圓圓 and Lin Siniang 林四娘 stories. Chen Yuanyuan was a famed late Ming courtesan who became involved with Wu Sangui 吳三桂 (1612–1678), the military commander who joined forces with the Manchus after one of Li Zicheng's rebel leaders captured Yuanyuan. Li traces the use of the Chen Yuanyuan/Wu Sangui story through...

Elective Affinities. Literary Soul Mates and the Marketplace in late Qing Fiction

There is a saying: “For whom do you act, and who will pay attention to you?” When Zhong-zi Qi died, Bo Ya never played his harp again. Why was that? A man does something for the sake of someone who understands him, as a woman adorns herself for someone who is attracted to her. In the triangle of author, work, and public the last is no passive part, no chain of mere reactions, but rather itself an energy formative of history. This is an article about books within books and the passions and the actions they engender. It explores, in other words, fictional representations of the act of reading and writing, selling and buying books in late Qing literature. This theme is not a novelty in the xiaoshuo tradition. In fact, one would be surprised not to find such representations of printed matter in the text-obsessed Chinese culture. Eleven centuries of printing books, resting on an even longer tradition of literary production and scholarship, attest to the centrality of the written word in Chinese society, where, as Cynthia J. Brokaw writes, “possession of—or at least access to—books was essential to respectable success.” No wonder, then, that authors wrote books into their novels. The way in which some popular fictional works at the end of the Qing dynasty frame the reading and buying of books, however, is striking enough to raise a set of very interesting questions: What can we learn from the ways books, as physical, tangible objects, are represented in the novels of this period? Where and why do the authors position themselves and the readers of

Fictions of Enlightenment: Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors and Dream of the Red Chamber, and: Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of Enlightenment: Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors and Dream of the Red Chamber, and: Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature Louise Edwards Li Qiancheng . Fictions of Enlightenment: Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors and Dream of the Red Chamber. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. 250 pp. Hardcover $48.00, ISBN 0-8248-2597-7. Zhou Zuyan . Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature. University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. 324 pp. Hardcover $55.00, ISBN 0-8248-2571-3. These two volumes both present new perspectives on classical Chinese fiction. Fictions of Enlightenment addresses the impact of Buddhist thought on the creation of classical Chinese fiction. Li Qiancheng argues convincingly that previous scholarship on three key novels—the Xiyou ji, Xiyou bu, and Honglou meng—has drastically underestimated the influence of Buddhism on both the creative process that produced these novels and on the reception of them. Fictions of Enlightenment reminds us that while Buddhism's influence on China has in the past century been limited, this was far from the case in earlier times. In this regard, Li's volume is a welcome and long overdue study. Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature examines key texts from this highly productive period of China's history and seeks evidence for androgynous gender identity in the society of the time. The Honglou meng, Jin Ping Mei, and Mudan ting are among the significant texts that this volume examines. Li Qiancheng's contribution to our understanding of the classical novel in Fictions of Enlightenment emerges not only in his innovative analysis of the novels themselves but also in his discussion of the materiality of writing novels in China. Li reminds us that while Confucianism was central to literati life, the marginalization of fiction within the Confucian tradition opened this genre to the full embrace of Buddhism. Scholars writing novels were consciously deploying Buddhist imagery and Buddhist philosophy against an overarching Confucian view of their class. The Mahayana tradition that flourished in China presented, in Li's terms, a "paradox" wherein the mundane world is unreal and yet time spent within it is vitally necessary for an individual to achieve transcendence in nirvâa. It was this tension between reality and illusion, the red dust of the world and enlightenment, that is the very stuff of much of Chinese fiction. While most students of Chinese learn that the Tang huaben were the origins of the novel in China, few would have been presented with such a coherent discussion of the continued importance of Buddhism to the writing and reading of fiction through to the high Qing. Li's volume is invaluable in filling this gap. In his exploration of the immensely popular Xiyou ji, Li has contributed a long overdue analysis of the "journey" as a powerful trope illuminating the philosophical and literary context of the novel. This has been achieved with a clear [End Page 154] and coherent explication of underlying Buddhist principles that gives the novel its depth. Li's analysis reminds us of the novel's artistry: it can be at once a highly sophisticated philosophical treatise and a popular tale of adventure and magic. This polyvalent text is brought to full life in Li's volume as both philosophical and popular modes of appreciating the travails of Sun Wukong and his traveling companions intersect and inform each other. The journey to enlightenment continues with a chapter on the Xiyou bu. This sixteen-chapter supplement to the Xiyou ji was written in 1640 and provides, according to Li, a bridge linking the sixteenth-century Xiyou ji and the eighteenth-century Honglou meng. Li regards this brief "insert" into the Xiyou ji as establishing new directions in the "fictions of enlightenment" that enabled the Honglou meng to emerge as an enduring work of immense mastery. The link emerges from the Xiyou bu's exploration of desire and emotion in Sun Wukong. Where the Xiyou ji deals with the avoidance of the desires of the tangible world, the Xiyou bu moves toward an advocacy of experiencing them. The novel reveals that one must first dream before waking...

Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature. By Zuyan Zhou. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. x, 324 pp. $49.00 (cloth).

Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature. By Zuyan Zhou. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. x, 324 pp. $49.00 (cloth).

Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature

The frequent appearance of androgyny in Ming and Qing literature has long interested scholars of late imperial Chinese culture. A flourishing economy, widespread education, rising individualism, a prevailing hedonism - all of these had contributed to the gradual disintegration of traditional gender roles in late Ming and early Qing China (1550-1750) and given rise to the phenomenon of androgyny. Now, Zuyan Zhou sheds new light on this important period, offering a highly original and astute look at the concept of androgyny in key works of Chinese fiction and drama from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The work begins with an exploration of androgyny in Chinese philosophy and Ming-Qing culture. Zhou proceeds to examine chronologically the appearance of androgyny in major literary writing of the time, yielding novel interpretations of canonical works from The Plum in the Golden Vase, through the scholar-beauty romances, to The Dream of the Red Chamber. He traces the ascendance of the androgyny craze in the late Ming, its culmination in the Ming-Qing transition, and its gradual phasing out after the mid-Qing. The study probes deviations from engendered codes of behavior both in culture and literature, then focuses on two parallel areas: androgyny in literary characterization and androgyny in literati identity. The author concludes that androgyny in late Ming and early Qing literature is essentially the dissident literati's stance against tyrannical politics, a psychological strategy to relieve anxiety over growing political inferiority.

SUBLIME LOVE AND THE ETHICS OF EQUALITY IN A HOMOEROTIC NOVEL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: PRECIOUS MIRROR OF BOY ACTRESSES

AbstractPrecious Mirror of Boy Actresses is the most serious piece of fiction about male love since the late Ming and the lengthiest of all in Chinese literary history. It is remarkable in its extension of the egalitarian implications of the qing aesthetic that it inherits from the late Ming and from earlier Qing literature such as Dream of the Red Chamber. In the homoerotic relationship it idealizes, lovers who are rigidly separated in terms of status nevertheless experience a sublime love which necessarily results in the liberation of the man of lower status. The novel makes unique use of the qing aesthetic's idealization of the feminine to arrive at this ethically pragmatic conclusion whereby liberation is achieved. The foregrounding of this sublime love and the qing-perfected characters who embody it, moreover, link the novel with other works of the period which portray a China that is ultimately a stable and invulnerable entity. Thus Precious Mirror's interpretation of qing carries a historical significance in spite of the novel's obliviousness of the social and political turmoil of China in the mid-nineteenth century.

Heroic Transformations: Women and National Trauma in Early Qing Literature

Dans le contexte du debut de la dynastie Qing, les critiques de la sensibilite Ming, la reevalutaion du domaine romantique et esthetique ainsi que les representations litteraires des femmes heroiques sont presentes chez les auteurs de litterature tout autant que l'apologie, la nostalgie, les regrets et le jugement historique, inseparables de la memoire de la transition dynastique Ming traumatique. C'est ce spectre d'attitudes culturelles exprimees a travers la transformation des figures feminines heroiques que cet article analyse : il s'agit d'etudier comment et pourquoi les images heroiques feminines ont ete creees au debut de la dynastie Qing.