The Many Faces of Ruan Dacheng: Poet, Playwright, Politician in Seventeenth-Century China is the first monograph in English on a controversial Ming dynasty literary figure. It examines and re-assesses the life and work of Ruan Dacheng (1587–1646), a poet, dramatist, and politician in the late Ming period. Ruan Dacheng was in his own time a highly regarded poet, but is best known as a dramatist, and his poetry is now largely unknown. He is most notorious as a ‘treacherous official’ of the Ming–Qing transition, and as a result his literary work—his plays as well as his poetry—has been neglected and undervalued. Hardie argues that Ruan’s literary work is of much greater significance in the history of Chinese literature than has generally been recognised since his own time. Ruan, rather than being a transgressive figure, is actually a very typical late Ming literatus, and as such his attitudes towards identity and authenticity can add to our understanding of these issues in late Ming intellectual history. These insights will impact on the cultural and intellectual history of late imperial China. ‘This work is exciting and reads almost like a novel. It has both a biographical and a literary component. It successively examines Ruan Dacheng’s biography in the context of his time, his complex relationships with his contemporaries, and the question of the judgment made on him in his time and by posterity.’ —Rainier Lanselle, École Pratique des Hautes Études, France ‘The author makes a persuasive argument that Ruan Dacheng deserves revaluation as a late Ming literatus and makes a contribution to the field of premodern Chinese literature and culture by presenting his life and work within a broader context, especially by examining examples of his poetry and discussing his plays.’ —Richard Strassberg, UCLA

After the strikingly beautiful Peony Pavilion, how could one write about love and the ideal of emotional authenticity (qing) in the chuanqi genre? This book presents a group of creative dramatists who confronted this challenge by giving the romantic theme of chuanqi their unique comic twists. This book demonstrates how their comic articulations bring the qing ideal down to the mundane world of family obligations, political ambitions, commercial interests, and gender frustrations. By highlighting the crucial but understudied role that the comic plays, this book enriches our understanding of the intellectual depth and critical scope of the chuanqi genre.

The long seventeenth century in China was a period of tremendous commercial expansion, and no literary genre was better equipped to articulate its possibilities than southern drama. As a form and a practice, southern drama was in the business of world-building—both in its structural imperative to depict and reconcile the social whole and in its creation of entire economies dependent on its publication and performance. However, the early modern commercial world repelled rather than engaged most playwrights, who consigned its totems—the merchant and his money—to the margins as sources of political suspicion and cultural anxiety. In The Cornucopian Stage, Ariel Fox examines a body of influential yet understudied plays by a circle of Suzhou playwrights who enlisted the theatrical imaginary to very different ends. In plays about long-distance traders and small-time peddlers, impossible bargains and broken contracts, strings of cash and storehouses of silver, the Suzhou circle placed commercial forms not only at center stage but at the center of a new world coming into being. Here, Fox argues, the economic character of early modern selfhood is recast as fundamentally productive—as the basis for new subject positions, new kinds of communities, and new modes of art.

Focusing on two late-Ming or early-Qing plays central to the Chinese canon (Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan), this study explores crucial questions concerning personal identity.

This innovative collection explores the life stories of Chinese women and men between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on both biographical and autobiographical narratives and on perspectives taken from life writing theory to ask how lives were lived and written within and against the rules of the auto/biographical game.

The story is set in the last days of the Ming Dynasty, when the Manchu invaders were already in close proximity to the capital. Instead of fighting the enemy, the great officials of state devoted themselves to intrigues, corruption and self-aggrandizement. A few concerned individuals, mostly members of the literati, spent time in endless debates and took no practical action. It fell to a courtesan, the Perfumed Lady, to show them the way. Her young lover, Hou Fangyu, however, chose to relinquish the world, in spite of his earlier professions of patriotism. Broken-hearted, she retired to a convent and became a nun. Much of what appears in the book is factual. The principle characters were real people; even the fan existed.