China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: David Der-wei Wang, Columbia University
Discussant: Robert E. Hegel, Washington University
This proposed panel examines the political and literary dynamics of late imperial China by looking into two of the most exciting moments, the late Ming and the late Qing. Whereas the late Ming has been likened to the Renaissance in terms of its intellectual iconoclasm and literary invention, the late Qing has been regarded as the progenitor of Chinese modernity. Amid historical contingencies like the dynastic decline and foreign invasion, the two periods managed to generate critical and creative impulses that have always been essential to artistic innovation.
By drawing together the achievements of these two periods, the panel tackles the following questions: How did the writers enact the dialogics between political agency and literary engagement? How did textual revisions in genres, modes, topoi, and types point to historical re-visions? How did the changing mode of cultural production affect the way literature was created, read, and circulated? In what way did the literati undergo their own metamorphosis when undertaking the renewal of literature? In posing such questions, the panel will clearly not be imposing superficial parallels between the late Ming and the late Qing. The aim is to draw creative trajectories of the two periods in such a way as to illuminate all such periods of intellectual and aesthetic change. This panel will also serve as the pilot session of a larger research and conference project to be conducted at Columbia University in the year 1998–1999.
There are five panelists. Patrick Hanan (Harvard University) discusses the late Qing novel, the Fengyue meng (Dream of Romance) in the context of Ming and Qing erotic narrative. He focuses on how the novel recapitulates as well as reinvents the conventions of its late Ming predecessors, and how it sheds light on the late Qing constellation of manners and morals. Ellen Widmer (Wesleyan University) takes up the Jinghuayuan (Flowers in the Mirror) as a pivot in the late imperial pursuit of womanhood. She explores the novel’s imaginary response to the feminine issues raised in late Ming literature and in the Xi youji (The Journey to the West) in particular. At the same time, she situates it as a precursor to feminist discourse propagated by late Qing activists. David Der-wei Wang (Columbia University) deals with the novel Xi youji as a late Ming attempt at negotiating with the unknown by means of fantasy. He sets the novel next to three of its late Qing rewritings and discusses the extent to which new geographical and intellectual discoveries had already affected fantastic imagination. Finally, Wei Shang (Columbia University) incorporates the concerns of the three papers—social/behavioral refashioning; gendered subjectivity; and spatial and intellectual exploration—into a general inquiry regarding the changing mode of cultural production. He shows how the late Qing public sphere as represented by publication industry and news media may find a counterpart in the late Ming, when miscellaneous manuals and popular reading materials had formed a network of consensual wisdom. In both cases, dynastic decline unleashed the social desire for knowledge. Robert Hegel (Washington University) will serve as panel discussant.
Patrick Hanan, Harvard University
Li Xun was first to describe the "courtesan" novel (he uses the term xiaxie) as a type, or rather as two types. One type, akin to the romance, he traces from the Pinhua baojian of the 1840s and the Hua yue hen of the 1850s; the other, more "realistic," he traces to the Haishang hua liezhuan of the 1890s. At one point he implies that the latter developed out of the former. Lu Xun did not have access to the Fengyue meng, a courtesan novel with an 1848 preface that definitely belongs to the "realistic" type.
This paper affirms the significance of Lu Xun’s typological division, but points out that it existed from the beginning. Although both types share certain features, such as a contemporary setting and an allegiance to the Honglou meng, they are separate streams with little or no interaction. By contrast, within each, there is a good deal of intertextual reference; in particular, the Haishang hua liezhuan can be seen as acknowledging the influence of Fengyue meng. Both types are related to the notation book literature on courtesans from the late Ming and Qing, but in general they are allied to different thematic kinds in Chinese fiction as a whole; the romance is allied to the caizi jiaren, and the "realistic" type to the cautionary novel.
The "realistic" type has a particular local origin. The Fengyue meng is set in Yangzhou; it is a "city novel" in a new sense of that term, and can be shown to have roots in Yangzhou oral and vernacular literature. The story of this type of courtesan novel is of its transference from Yangzhou to the new metropolis of Shanghai. By 1900 even the Fengyue meng itself had been reworked and republished as a Shanghai novel.
Ellen Widmer, Wesleyan University
Jinghua yuan was written between about 1810 and 1820. Its most famous chapters take place in The Country of Women (chapters 34–36), where a man suffers the indignity of having his ears pierced and his feet bound. One inspiration for this Country lies in the late-Ming novel Xiyou ji. Shui-hu zhuan, another late-Ming novel, exerts a further influence on Jinghua yuan. Shui-hu’s influence helps to explain Jinghua yuan’s rhetorical opaqueness, as far as women’s issues are concerned.
My paper seeks first to trace these derivations and then to show that despite a certain indirectness in what it tries to say, Jinghua yuan displays far greater sensitivity to the concerns of women than either of its late-Ming predecessors. I shall also address the question of Jinghua yuan’s relation to the socially critical literature of the late Qing. Can the author, Li Ruzhen, be considered a serious social critic, or are his inversions of gender merely playful, hence devoid of any reformist content? Would Li Ruzhen have approved of the anti-footbinding movement that began to gather momentum in the late Qing?
In answering these questions, I shall resort in part to fictional examples. The lives of women poets Li might have known or known about provide a second source from which conclusions will be drawn.
David Der-wei Wang, Columbia University
The Xiyou ji (The Journey to the West) is regarded as one of four great novels of the late Ming period. With its imaginative accounts of overseas adventures, huge gallery of supernatural figures, and ingenious presentation of Buddhist teachings, the novel shows how the late Ming literary community succeeded in re-imagining the traditional intellectual and geographical territories of the Unknown.
Drawing on examples from the Journey to the West, the paper inquires into three issues concerning the dynamic of late Ming fictionality. It asks how the fantastic mode helped refashion the discourse of realism; how the comic narrative mobilized the forces of intellectual transgression with the help of generic travesty; how the travel/quest motif instantiated the social imaginary of exoticism. Moreover, it argues that these same issues can be raised again with regard to late Qing fiction and that they are most pointedly and provocatively manifested in late Qing rewritings of this late Ming classic.
With three little known late Qing works, Xin Xiyouji (New Journey to the West, 1909), "Wuli qunao zhi Xiyouji" ("A Ridiculous Journey to the West," 1908), and Xin Fengshenzhuan (New Investiture of the Gods, 1908) as examples, the paper shows how: (1) the form of the fantastic underwent drastic changes as a result of late Qing writers’ renewed attempts to envision the real; (2) the mode of laughter induced by the works led to a sort of defiant impulse hitherto repressed by Chinese comedy; (3) the West, once an emblem of mystical hope and nearly unattainable topographies, suddenly presented on the East coast of China, and became endowed with terrifying intellectual, political, and geographical powers. By parodying The Journey to the West, the three late Qing works signaled a new resurgence in indigenous creativity and the arrival of an age in which the Chinese too could see themselves as "Western."
Wei Shang, Columbia University
The upsurge of mass media during the late Qing bears unmistakable influence of the West. The scholars of the late Qing media have emphasized the significance of mass media in permeating the ideas of enlightenment and modernity and in constructing a Chinese version of Jurgen Habermas’ "public sphere." My study focuses, however, on the continuation and transformation of the tradition of commercial publishing in the late Qing newspapers and magazines. I argue that the late Qing media continued the process of constructing the discursive sphere of the everyday world that first emerged in the late Ming and culminated in the late Qing. Published on a regular basis and for an expanded reading public, the traditional categories of publications from the repertoire of the popular almanacs, commonplace books, and literary and nonliterary miscellanies were preserved, renewed, and accommodated to contemporary needs and tastes.
Focusing on the construction of the everyday world in the late Ming commercial publications and the transformation thereof in the late Qing mass media, this paper shows: (1) As a product of the commercial publishing enterprise, the late Ming popular reading materials constitute a common discourse on the everyday life, which is not subject in its routine operations to the domination of the official and elite ideology; (2) Such common discourse does not appeal to "reason" through discussion, debate and the exchange of opinions. Its power of persuasion is derived from the conventional praxis, consensual wisdom, and a consciousness that is inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed as common sense; (3) With necessary adjustments according to the time and circumstances, the discourse of the everyday world offers a stable basis for a mass culture shared by people of different regions, generations and social classes; (4) In the late Qing, as well as in modern and contemporary China, the discursive sphere of the everyday life becomes a field of contest, in which the old and new confront and constantly negotiate with each other. In magazines, newspapers and other publications, the late Ming version of the everyday world is either juxtaposed or mixed up with the modern, Western version or made as an object for cultural critique and thus as something to be repressed and replaced. Despite frequent distortions and repression, however, it has left an indelible imprint on our repository of values, attitudes and praxis.