Papers by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
This article argues that a shift in conceptions of great evil occurred during the Ming-Qing trans... more This article argues that a shift in conceptions of great evil occurred during the Ming-Qing transition through a literary analysis of the most hated villain in Chinese history, Wei Zhongxian 魏忠賢 (1568-1627). A unique pair of novels about Wei Zhongxian, A Condemnation of Villainy: The Tale of Wei Zhongxian (Wei Zhongxian xiaoshuo chijian shu 魏忠賢小說斥奸書), from 1628, and An Idle Commentary on the Monster (Taowu xianping 檮杌閒評), from the early Qing, are invaluable evidence of this shift. In A Condemnation, the author gives Wei Zhongxian “bee’s eyes,” a physiognomic and unmistakable sign of inborn villainy. In the novel, Wei’s rise to power is the direct result of his own machinations and persecutions, which evokes the unmediated emotions of indignation and ridicule in the reader. In the early Qing novel An Idle Commentary, however, Wei Zhongxian is portrayed as a dim-witted buffoon whose rise to power was the result of happenstance and coincidence. This portrayal of Wei Zhongxian evokes a much wider range of emotions from sympathy, to ridicule, and even to empathy. The first portrayal derives from the author’s confidence in the ethical power of fiction and an overarching Heaven providing moral order to the world. The second novel points to a profound pessimism and deep suspicion about Heaven’s ordering power after the Ming-Qing cataclysm. These two strikingly different portrayals of Wei Zhongxian provide us with two stark examples of how late imperial fiction writers explored both key philosophical questions about human nature and the origins of great evil during the decline and fall of the glorious Ming.
Scholars of physiognomy in traditional China commonly acknowledged the importance of the mid-Ming... more Scholars of physiognomy in traditional China commonly acknowledged the importance of the mid-Ming text, A Compendium for the Expert Physiognomist (Shenxiang quanbian 神相全編), as a “textbook of physiognomy” and as the “single most important Chinese reference work for ‘body divination’.” The creation of the Compendium and what its method of compilation and organization says about Ming period constructions of knowledge has been previously overlooked.
This paper argues that the Compendium offers us a unique vantage point for studying the issue of comprehensiveness in book compilation, which was a lasting concern among Chinese writers and publishers in late imperial times. It poses questions about the nature of the Compendium’s claim to comprehensiveness: did the editor mean the work possessed an expanded lexicon? A more systematic codification of physiognomic knowledge? More importantly, what was it about the claim to comprehensiveness that has made this text so popular and versatile? What were the main agendas behind the creation of a “comprehensive compilation”?
In the Compendium, “comprehensiveness” was as much a manufactured effect linked to the methods of collection and organization as the sheer volume of physiognomic knowledge included. The selective adoption of different ways of putting texts together—anthology and collectanea—and the mixing and meshing of different genres and linguistic registers all signified an attempt to address different levels of reading audience. Through new ways of collecting and organizing, the editor sought to cater to different levels of audience by presenting physiognomic knowledge as suitable for various kinds of readers. The collection’s versatility and continuing popularity is thus best understood within the context of the new publishing and reading trends in the Ming dynasty.
Sinica-Leidensia, 101
Are authenticity and theatricality necessarily contradictory? Can the two concepts be connected? ... more Are authenticity and theatricality necessarily contradictory? Can the two concepts be connected? Early modern Chinese novelists and fiction critics readily associated theatricality with the powerful movement of authenticity by valorizing ‘incongruous acting.’ Acting with incongruity is present when a fictional character, such as Lu Zhishen in Shuihu zhuan or Monkey in Xiyou ji, impersonates another identity, experiences a transformation, or puts on a masquerade, but the change or shift remains incomplete giving rise to clashes of performative codes.
This chapter begins with a discussion of a few characteristic examples of acting with incongruity. I argue that its primary significance derived from fiction commentators linking incongruous acting with the important and valorized concept of spontaneity. To conclude, I discuss how the “Li Zhi” commentator used the one-word identities ‘Buddha’ and ‘Monkey’ as markers of incongruity to illustrate a unique connection between spontaneity, authenticity, and theatricality that epitomizes an interesting formation of selfhood through the conflation of the theatrical and the real.
Sinica-Leidensia, 101
This work is the first attempt to view the cultural fascination with and imagination of theater a... more This work is the first attempt to view the cultural fascination with and imagination of theater as an important historical and literary context for the full-length novel in the late Ming and early Qing. It is the first to develop a theoretical framework particularly designed to analyze the various performances, masquerades, and other theatricals in early modern fiction. This study is not an examination of either theater as a popular social practice or theatricality solely in drama, as has been ably covered by previous scholars, but of how a theater- and theatrically-informed intellectual orientation influenced the worldview of fiction writers and the lives that they created and how readers/commentators received and recreated that theatricalist fiction. We might ask, what was the nature of theatricality? How did the theatrical imagination affect literature, especially the mature novel? What does the self-reflective reference to playacting and the production and reception of theatricals in early modern novels signify?
Sinica-Leidensia, 101
Jin Shengtan, the most important seventeenth century fiction critic, distinguished between “a fem... more Jin Shengtan, the most important seventeenth century fiction critic, distinguished between “a feminine wail” and “a masculine wail” in his commentary on the sixteenth century novel, Water Margin, one of the Chinese classics. “The masculine wail derives from the heart. One cannot control himself but give in to a loud wail to empty his sorrow.” A feminine wail is “crying in a low voice like a mosquito, rolling down the sleeve to cover the face, using tears to curse other people, and constant sniffling.”
Jin’s distinction between two kinds of wail is closely linked to two key concepts in early modern discourse – artifice and authenticity. This chapter from my book, The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China (Brill, 2011), adopts Jin’s perspective on artifice as the culturally feminine and authenticity as the culturally masculine to read the portrayal of Pan Jinlian, the most notoriously “bad woman,” and Wu Song, a much lauded “masculine hero” in Water Margin. While much has been written about Jinlian, the shrew, as an emblem of female transgression, adopting Jin’s perspective allows us to see that Jinlian is denigrated for being a duplicitous person, which puts her in stark contrast with Wu Song as an authentic one. When Wu Song’s kills Jinlian, then, authenticity symbolically triumphs over artifice. While scholars have shown that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century construction of gender was particularly complicated and involved a series of shifts in metaphors, I show yet another facet, the gendering of authenticity and artifice, which also helps produce a new reading of two famous characters in Water Margin.
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews
The prosimetric form, the incorporation of verse in prose narrative, is a distinctive generic fea... more The prosimetric form, the incorporation of verse in prose narrative, is a distinctive generic feature of vernacular fiction in late imperial China. Many scholars have regarded verse in fiction as a type of narrative redundancy or a sign of orality. This article examines the narrative significance of verse in Feng Menglong’s “The Pearl Shirt Reencountered,” arguing that Feng utilized the two narrative spaces of the prosimetric form—verse space and prose space—to juxtapose a highly moralizing narratorial voice with a counter-voice influenced by Wang Yangming’s “School of the Mind.”
Among the important ‘compositional dynamics’ in early modern Chinese drama and fiction illustrati... more Among the important ‘compositional dynamics’ in early modern Chinese drama and fiction illustrations is the visual representation of the viewers and the viewed. The space being viewed is often framed by stage-like iconic signs, which create and police the boundaries that separate from and connect with the viewer’s space. This compositional dynamic leads to an implied theatricality as the result of a perceptual interaction between the onlooker and someone or something that is looked at. The space in which this viewing-viewed relationship occurs, often quotidian, is transformed by the presence of the relationship into a theatrical space—it is a theatrical space not because a ‘performance’ takes place nor because it visually represents a theatrical space, but because it is where the viewers interface with the viewed. This broadened theatrical space helps elucidate the heightened stage consciousness in social discourses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries concerned with identity performance—that is, the ‘staginess’ within the text is shown through visual representations.
Sinica-Leidensia, 101
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of great affluence and cultural florescence... more The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of great affluence and cultural florescence, but also of growing political, social, and intellectual insecurity. It was also a period when watching theater was an important form of entertainment. This paper examines a specific group of poems, yongju shi 詠劇詩 (poetry on theater), which was written, exchanged, and circulated extensively beginning in late imperial China, as an entry point for understanding the ephemeral process of watching theater. In these poems the authors evaluate, ruminate on, and personalize their responses to plays, playwrights, performers, and performances.
I examine poems by Du Jun 杜濬 (1611-87), Gong Dingzi 龔鼎孳 (1615-73), and Mao Xiang 冒襄 (1611-1693), and others, whose personal experiences were quite varied. Diverse as the subject matter and the social status of the poets might be, yongju shi, especially in the latter half of the seventeenth century, display a distinctive generic feature in one of their subject matters: the rumination on the theatrical world and its relationship to real life. For these poets, an understanding of the ephemeral nature of theater was crucial, and even therapeutic, for living through this chaotic period. Theater, I thus argue, became a popular subject to be poeticized because the ephemeral nature of theater resonated with the epochal spirit of the Ming-Qing period.
Essays in Chinese by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
An essay about the narrator/a young girl's trip to a fishing village in eastern Zhejiang.
Translations by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
In Inheritance within Rupture, Luo Zhitian brings together ten essays to explore the themes of ch... more In Inheritance within Rupture, Luo Zhitian brings together ten essays to explore the themes of change and continuity, rupture and inheritance from the late Qing through the early Republic (1890s-1940s). Rejecting binaries such as tradition/modernity, conservative/liberal, Luo blurs the divisions between intellectual opponents and clarifies the divergences between scholarly friends. Centering these discussions around some of the most famous intellectual debates in the modern period, Luo challenges our understanding of ideological positions, political affiliation, and scholarly identity in early twentieth-century China. By focusing on the influence of cultural inheritance within the rupture of modernity, we come to understand those concerns shared by all Chinese in their own times and in the present.
Books by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
In Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, Luo Zhitian brings together nine essays t... more In Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, Luo Zhitian brings together nine essays to explore the causes and consequences of various shifts of power in modern Chinese society, including the shift from scholars to intellectuals, from the traditional state to the modern state, and from the people to society. Adopting a microhistorical approach, Luo situates these shifts at the intersection of social change and intellectual evolution in the midst of modern China’s culture wars with the West. Those culture wars produced new problems for China, but also provided some new intellectual resources as Chinese scholars and intellectuals grappled with the collisions and convergences of old and new in late Qing and early Republican China.
In Inheritance within Rupture, Luo Zhitian brings together ten essays to explore the themes of ch... more In Inheritance within Rupture, Luo Zhitian brings together ten essays to explore the themes of change and continuity, rupture and inheritance from the late Qing through the early Republic (1890s-1940s). Rejecting binaries such as tradition/modernity, conservative/liberal, Luo blurs the divisions between intellectual opponents and clarifies the divergences between scholarly friends. Centering these discussions around some of the most famous intellectual debates in the modern period, Luo challenges our understanding of ideological positions, political affiliation, and scholarly identity in early twentieth-century China. By focusing on the influence of cultural inheritance within the rupture of modernity, we come to understand those concerns shared by all Chinese in their own times and in the present.
Articles by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
Book Reviews by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
Overall, Volpp’s book is full of insightful and nuanced literary analysis and philosophical discu... more Overall, Volpp’s book is full of insightful and nuanced literary analysis and philosophical discussions of a century when theatricality emerged as a dominant theme in Chinese intellectual and literary life. She makes significant contributions to the study of late imperial Chinese literature, our understanding of various types of theatricality, and the intimate relationship between literature and philosophy. Reading Volpp’s work in concert with my book, The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China, in which I also broaden the concept of theatricality, by following early modern writers and their incorporation of theatrically-informed plot/event/structure in their literary works, we come to a much better understanding of the real importance of theatricality in the seventeenth century. Worldly Stage is not only an erudite book and delightful read, but also a provocative work that challenges readers to think about the power and limitations of metaphors, and provokes them to consider the promises and pitfalls of theatricality as “a sign empty of meaning…the meaning of all signs.”
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Papers by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
This paper argues that the Compendium offers us a unique vantage point for studying the issue of comprehensiveness in book compilation, which was a lasting concern among Chinese writers and publishers in late imperial times. It poses questions about the nature of the Compendium’s claim to comprehensiveness: did the editor mean the work possessed an expanded lexicon? A more systematic codification of physiognomic knowledge? More importantly, what was it about the claim to comprehensiveness that has made this text so popular and versatile? What were the main agendas behind the creation of a “comprehensive compilation”?
In the Compendium, “comprehensiveness” was as much a manufactured effect linked to the methods of collection and organization as the sheer volume of physiognomic knowledge included. The selective adoption of different ways of putting texts together—anthology and collectanea—and the mixing and meshing of different genres and linguistic registers all signified an attempt to address different levels of reading audience. Through new ways of collecting and organizing, the editor sought to cater to different levels of audience by presenting physiognomic knowledge as suitable for various kinds of readers. The collection’s versatility and continuing popularity is thus best understood within the context of the new publishing and reading trends in the Ming dynasty.
This chapter begins with a discussion of a few characteristic examples of acting with incongruity. I argue that its primary significance derived from fiction commentators linking incongruous acting with the important and valorized concept of spontaneity. To conclude, I discuss how the “Li Zhi” commentator used the one-word identities ‘Buddha’ and ‘Monkey’ as markers of incongruity to illustrate a unique connection between spontaneity, authenticity, and theatricality that epitomizes an interesting formation of selfhood through the conflation of the theatrical and the real.
Jin’s distinction between two kinds of wail is closely linked to two key concepts in early modern discourse – artifice and authenticity. This chapter from my book, The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China (Brill, 2011), adopts Jin’s perspective on artifice as the culturally feminine and authenticity as the culturally masculine to read the portrayal of Pan Jinlian, the most notoriously “bad woman,” and Wu Song, a much lauded “masculine hero” in Water Margin. While much has been written about Jinlian, the shrew, as an emblem of female transgression, adopting Jin’s perspective allows us to see that Jinlian is denigrated for being a duplicitous person, which puts her in stark contrast with Wu Song as an authentic one. When Wu Song’s kills Jinlian, then, authenticity symbolically triumphs over artifice. While scholars have shown that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century construction of gender was particularly complicated and involved a series of shifts in metaphors, I show yet another facet, the gendering of authenticity and artifice, which also helps produce a new reading of two famous characters in Water Margin.
I examine poems by Du Jun 杜濬 (1611-87), Gong Dingzi 龔鼎孳 (1615-73), and Mao Xiang 冒襄 (1611-1693), and others, whose personal experiences were quite varied. Diverse as the subject matter and the social status of the poets might be, yongju shi, especially in the latter half of the seventeenth century, display a distinctive generic feature in one of their subject matters: the rumination on the theatrical world and its relationship to real life. For these poets, an understanding of the ephemeral nature of theater was crucial, and even therapeutic, for living through this chaotic period. Theater, I thus argue, became a popular subject to be poeticized because the ephemeral nature of theater resonated with the epochal spirit of the Ming-Qing period.
Essays in Chinese by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
Translations by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
Books by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
Articles by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
Book Reviews by Mei Chun (Surname Mei)
This paper argues that the Compendium offers us a unique vantage point for studying the issue of comprehensiveness in book compilation, which was a lasting concern among Chinese writers and publishers in late imperial times. It poses questions about the nature of the Compendium’s claim to comprehensiveness: did the editor mean the work possessed an expanded lexicon? A more systematic codification of physiognomic knowledge? More importantly, what was it about the claim to comprehensiveness that has made this text so popular and versatile? What were the main agendas behind the creation of a “comprehensive compilation”?
In the Compendium, “comprehensiveness” was as much a manufactured effect linked to the methods of collection and organization as the sheer volume of physiognomic knowledge included. The selective adoption of different ways of putting texts together—anthology and collectanea—and the mixing and meshing of different genres and linguistic registers all signified an attempt to address different levels of reading audience. Through new ways of collecting and organizing, the editor sought to cater to different levels of audience by presenting physiognomic knowledge as suitable for various kinds of readers. The collection’s versatility and continuing popularity is thus best understood within the context of the new publishing and reading trends in the Ming dynasty.
This chapter begins with a discussion of a few characteristic examples of acting with incongruity. I argue that its primary significance derived from fiction commentators linking incongruous acting with the important and valorized concept of spontaneity. To conclude, I discuss how the “Li Zhi” commentator used the one-word identities ‘Buddha’ and ‘Monkey’ as markers of incongruity to illustrate a unique connection between spontaneity, authenticity, and theatricality that epitomizes an interesting formation of selfhood through the conflation of the theatrical and the real.
Jin’s distinction between two kinds of wail is closely linked to two key concepts in early modern discourse – artifice and authenticity. This chapter from my book, The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China (Brill, 2011), adopts Jin’s perspective on artifice as the culturally feminine and authenticity as the culturally masculine to read the portrayal of Pan Jinlian, the most notoriously “bad woman,” and Wu Song, a much lauded “masculine hero” in Water Margin. While much has been written about Jinlian, the shrew, as an emblem of female transgression, adopting Jin’s perspective allows us to see that Jinlian is denigrated for being a duplicitous person, which puts her in stark contrast with Wu Song as an authentic one. When Wu Song’s kills Jinlian, then, authenticity symbolically triumphs over artifice. While scholars have shown that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century construction of gender was particularly complicated and involved a series of shifts in metaphors, I show yet another facet, the gendering of authenticity and artifice, which also helps produce a new reading of two famous characters in Water Margin.
I examine poems by Du Jun 杜濬 (1611-87), Gong Dingzi 龔鼎孳 (1615-73), and Mao Xiang 冒襄 (1611-1693), and others, whose personal experiences were quite varied. Diverse as the subject matter and the social status of the poets might be, yongju shi, especially in the latter half of the seventeenth century, display a distinctive generic feature in one of their subject matters: the rumination on the theatrical world and its relationship to real life. For these poets, an understanding of the ephemeral nature of theater was crucial, and even therapeutic, for living through this chaotic period. Theater, I thus argue, became a popular subject to be poeticized because the ephemeral nature of theater resonated with the epochal spirit of the Ming-Qing period.