Lawrence Yim focuses on Qian’s poetic theory and practice, providing a critical study of his theory of poetic-history (shishi) and poems from the Toubi ji. He also examines the role played by history in early Qing verse, rethinking the nature of loyalism and historical memory in seventeenth-century China.

Lawrence Yim focuses on Qian's poetic theory and practice, providing a critical study of his theory of poetic-history (shishi) and poems from the Toubi ji. He also examines the role played by history in early Qing verse, rethinking the nature of loyalism and historical memory in seventeenth-century China.

The thesis focuses on an innovative view of poetry of the late Ming poet and literary historian Qian Qianyi (1582–1664). It consists of close analysis and loose translation of Qian’s two essays on olfactory poetics. The stigma of Qian’s disloyalty to the Ming dynasty prevented sufficient scholarly research into his works before the end of the Qing era. There is still a scholarly lacuna of Qian’s literary works, particularly his prose texts, the vast majority of which remain unstudied. This thesis is thus a modest attempt to have a more comprehensive understanding of the controversial poet and the particular role literature can play in certain historical moments. Qian claims that good poetry is redolent with virtue and that one appreciates poetry not with one’s eyes, but by way of one’s nose. Critical examination I will discuss how Qian’s idiosyncratic view of poetry allowed him to express his mixed emotions about the Ming-Qing dynastic transition. Qian’s call to read and appreciate poetry not visually but olfcatorily was a concept referred to xiangguan, or “scent viewing.” This term derived primarily from the Buddhist notion of “nose-consciousness.” On the one hand, Qian Qianyi builds on the Buddhist notion of “nose-consciousness” and proposes “scent-viewing” as the capstone of his innovative view of poetry. On the other hand, he applies the narratives of qi (“breath”) and wei (“flavor”) in classical Chinese literary discourse, and merges them with Buddhist allusions to “scent” to construct the poetics of “scent-viewing.” In this way, Qian Qianyi carves up xiangguan poetics as a rhetorical medium to navigate contemporary literary and historical discourse. Qian Qianyi’s synesthetic poetics lies at the intersection of late Ming aesthetics, literary and religious values, and a traumatized personal experience, all of which are filtered through the memory of the poet with a problematic historical image, and presented in the two essays composed for a specific rhetorical and dialectic purpose. The notion of xiangguan reflects Qian’s effort to adjust to a new dynasty as much as it presents us a new perspective from which to examine the multiple roles poetry plays during a critical historical junture such as the Ming-Qing transition.

Qian Qianyi's Reflections on Yellow Mountain is a close examination of travel writing in seventeenth-century China, presenting an innovative reading of the youji genre. Taking the 'Account of My Travels at Yellow Mountain' by the noted poet, official andliterary historian Qian Qianyi (1582-1664) as his focus, Stephen McDowall departs from traditional readings of youji, by reading the landscape of Qian's essay as the product of a complex representational tradition, rather than as an empirically verifiable space. Drawing from a broad range of materials including personal anecdotes, traditional cosmographical sources, gazetteers, Daoist classics, paintings and woodblock prints, this book explores the fascinating world of late-Ming Jiangnan, highlighting the extent to which this one scholar's depiction of Yellow Mountain is informed, not so much by first-hand observation, as by the layers of meaning left by generations of travelers before him. McDowall includes the first complete English-language translation of Qian Qianyi's account, and presents the first full-length critical study to appear in any language. The ideas explored here make this book essential reading for scholars and students of late imperial Chinese history and literature, and also offer thought-provoking new insights for anyone interested in travel writing, human geography, the sociology of tourism, and visual culture.

In The Poet Zheng Zhen (1806-1864) and the Rise of Chinese Modernity, J. D. Schmidt provides the first detailed study in a Western language of one of China's greatest poets and explores the nineteenth-century background to Chinese modernity, challenging the widely held view that this is largely of Western origin. The volume contains a study of Zheng's life and times, an examination of his thought and literary theory, and four chapters studying his highly original contributions to poetry on the human realm, nature verse, narrative poetry, and the poetry of ideas, including his writings on science and technology. Over a hundred pages of translations of his verse conclude the work.

From the mid-sixteenth through the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese intellectuals attended more to dreams and dreaming—and in a wider array of genres—than in any other period of Chinese history. Taking the approach of cultural history, this ambitious yet accessible work aims both to describe the most salient aspects of this “dream arc” and to explain its trajectory in time through the writings, arts, and practices of well-known thinkers, religionists, litterateurs, memoirists, painters, doctors, and political figures of late Ming and early Qing times. The volume’s encompassing thesis asserts that certain associations of dreaming, grounded in the neurophysiology of the human brain at sleep—such as subjectivity, irrationality, the unbidden, lack of control, emotionality, spontaneity, the imaginal, and memory—when especially heightened by historical and cultural developments, are likely to pique interest in dreaming and generate florescences of dream-expression among intellectuals. The work thus makes a contribution to the history of how people have understood human consciousness in various times and cultures. The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World is the most substantial work in any language on the historicity of Chinese dream culture. Within Chinese studies, it will appeal to those with backgrounds in literature, religion, philosophy, political history, and the visual arts. It will also be welcomed by readers interested in comparative dream cultures, the history of consciousness, and neurohistory.

In what ways did Qing gentry women’s concern for gender and social propriety shape their assertions of female subjectivity and agency? How did they exploit the state promotion of female virtue and Confucian morality for self-fulfillment? With a focus on three of the most widely acclaimed mid-Qing women authors, this book uses both synchronic and diachronic approaches to analyze writings on conjugal love, widowhood, women’s education, maternal teaching, boudoir objects, and history, illustrating their vibrant, gendered revision of literati poetic convention, thus proposing an alternative analytical framework that goes beyond the rigid dichotomy of compliance versus resistance.