Ming Erotic Novellas: Genre, Consumption, and Religiosity in Cultural Practice.

AuthorGregory, Scott
PositionBook review

Ming Erotic Novellas: Genre, Consumption, and Religiosity in Cultural Practice. By RICHARD G. WANG. Hong Kong: CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG PRESS, 2011. Pp. xiii + 336. $50.

In this book, Richard G. Wang explores what he argues is an understudied genre of late imperial literature, the Ming novella. He claims that it is so overlooked that the majority of students of Chinese literature are not even aware of its existence (p. 5). It is not due to the literary qualities of the works of the genre, however, that he calls our attention to them. On the contrary, he admits that they are often clumsy in their pacing, and he shows that they are constructed from many stock elements found in other forms. He argues that the Ming novella has critical implications for the understanding of the development of Chinese narrative literature, representing a transition from shorter-form narrative genres such as the Six Dynasties zhiguai or Tang chuanqi classical tales on the one hand and the Ming-Qing xiaoshuo vernacular novel on the other. Furthermore, he moves beyond the level of literary historiography to the realm of the material culture of print and the circulation of books in the late Ming and early Qing in order to suggest what these books might have meant to their intended and real audiences, and he argues that their erotic and religious dimensions were of particular interest.

Previous scholars have estimated that there were approximately forty works of the genre printed in the late imperial era, though the majority of them are no longer extant. For his study, Wang selects from among the extant works eight that he deems to have been the most popular on the basis of the number of times they were reprinted and anthologized. Originally published as independent editions, the novellas were reprinted in miscellanies, a type of publication somewhat akin to magazines in which all manners of texts--novellas, poetry, sample letters, etc.--were printed together in different registers of the same page. Wang refers to those miscellanies that take fiction as their main focus as "fiction miscellanies," and he compares this category of book with others such as the well-known commercially published almanacs for daily use from the late Ming. The most popular pieces from the fiction miscellanies, Wang claims, were further selected by publishers for inclusion in "fiction anthologies." Unfortunately, Wang spends considerably less time explaining this stage, though it can...

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