Erotic Immortals, Ambiguous Figures, and Social Relationships: Reading the Illustrated Literature of Late Imperial China

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Inspired by scholarship on late imperial China’s illustrated books, such as Robert Hegel’s pioneering study and Yuming He’s newly published work, this panel focuses on illustrated literature during the Ming-Qing era (1368-1912) in hopes of uncovering the cultural impetus behind the production of such hybrid forms that combine visual images and written words on the same page. Our panelists use Ming-Qing pornographic collections and vernacular short stories to contemplate, reconsider, or question the notion of “literature” of the time. We address the following questions: How does the hybrid form of illustrated literature defy our understanding of “literature” as shaped during the “modern” era? How do visual images interact with words, reconfigure narratives, and fundamentally change readers’ reading experiences? To answer these questions, Xiaorong Li examines Ming erotic paintings and their accompanying poems to reveal the role of poetry in evoking eroticism. Peng Liu focuses on the interplay between narratives, poems, calligraphy, and paintings in Su’e pian to question the nature of this work. Wei Wang shows how the illustrations in Doupeng xianhua generate new interpretative and symbolic meanings for the narrative. Alexander Wille uses Tzvetan Todorov’s idea of social equilibria to understand the illustrations of Feng Menglong’s short stories. Our discussants are Katherine Carlitz and Vincent Durand-Dastès. The former’s study on book illustrations portraying the Ming-Qing chastity cult provides us with a new definition of pornography in the Chinese context. The latter has paid much attention to correlations between narratives and images of Chinese religious figures.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Peng Liu, Columbia University

Chair

• Katherine Carlitz, University of Pittsburgh

Individual Presentations

• “The Secret of Mandarin Ducks”: Sex as a Lyricized Scenario in Late Ming Chinese Erotic Art - Xiaorong Li, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Fictionalizing the Arts of the Bedchamber: The Immaculate Woman and the Ming Pornographic Manual Su’e pian - Peng Liu, Columbia University

• Visualizing the Obscurity: Reading the Illustrated Novel Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor - Wei Wang, Washington University in St. Louis

• Image and Text Relations in a Late Ming Collection of Short Vernacular Fiction - Alexander C. Wille, University of Colorado Boulder

Discussants

• Katherine Carlitz, University of Pittsburgh

• Vincent Durand-Dastès, INALCO