Towers in the Void: Li Yu and Early Modern Chinese Media
My scholarship situates early modern Chinese literature, whether fiction, plays, or essays, within a wider landscape of rapid cultural and economic transformations. My first book explores the work of the maverick cultural entrepreneur Li Yu, who survived the tumultuous Ming-Qing dynastic transition of the mid-seventeenth century through a commercially successful practice founded on intermedial experimentation. He engaged an astonishingly broad variety of cultural forms: from theatrical performance and literary production to fashion and wellness; from garden and interior design to the composition of letters and administrative documents. Drawing on his nonliterary work to reshape his writing, he translated this wide-ranging expertise into easily transmittable woodblock-printed form. Towers in the Void explores Li Yu’s work across these varied fields. It uses the concept of media to traverse them, revealing Li Yu’s creative enterprise as a remaking of early modern media forms.
I argue that Li Yu’s cultural experimentation exploits the seams between language and the tangible world, drawing attention to the materiality of particular media forms, and expanding the scope of early modern media by interweaving books, buildings, and bodies. Within and across these media, Li Yu’s cultural entrepreneurship with the technology of the printed book embraced its reproducibility while retaining a personal touch. His literary practice informed his garden design and, conversely, he drew on garden design to transform the vernacular short story. Ideas for extreme body modification in Li Yu’s fiction remade the possibilities of real human bodies in his nonfiction writing. Towers in the Void calls for seeing books, bodies, and buildings as interlinked media forms, both in early modern China and in today’s media-saturated world, positioning the Ming and Qing as a crucial site of global early modern cultural change.
The Ends of the Early Modern World: Worldmaking in China, 1592-1843
Whereas my current book manuscript foregrounds the material realities of literary texts and their production, my next project unearths visions of the world in Chinese narrative fiction published at the chronological edges of the early modern period. From the novelization of famous historical westward journeys of the Tang and early Ming in the 1590s on the one end, to the inscription of an encroaching world after the first Opium War in Wei Yuan’s Illustrated Record of the Maritime States (Haiguo tuzhi,1842) on the other, this period was one in which received understandings of the world were interacting, and sometimes conflicting, with changing bodies of geographic knowledge about a world not yet conceived as a globe. The introduction of arguments for the earth as a globe reverberated across various media, from disparate cartographic practices to new literary representations of the world. Drawing on arguments that posit the genre-crossing potential of the study of represented worlds, I explore the various ways in which the world is represented across different genres of narrative literature — novels, short vernacular fiction, and “plucked rhymes” – as well as other media. This project thus elucidates a range of imagined worlds as shared contemporary visions, highlighting the relatively hazy horizons of all early modern worlds.
I propose that our understanding of the early modern world reflects our own, quintessentially modern, existence within a knowable, traversable globe. Through an exploration of the media of worldmaking in early modern China, I argue that our understanding of Chinese early modernity within a worldwide context requires the explicit consideration of both temporal and geographical difference. Rather than describing the texts I engage and situating them in their historical context, I approach them in a deliberately anachronistic way, acknowledging my own positionality, and the outcome – just one of many possible ones – that emerged from it. Building on scholarship that has demonstrated the simultaneous emergence of different phenomena in different locations during early modernity, I approach the study of early modern China through what I term its “temporal edges.”
Embodiment in Early Modern China
In addition to these book-length projects, I am also working on a series of essays on gender in early modern China, highlighting the relationship between notions of sex, theater, and the emerging commodity market. I have published an article from this project in the journal differences.
