The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China

This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series, headed by Victor Mair (University of Pennsylvania).

In Chinese literary history, the construction of images of beautiful women by literati tended to reach a high tide during periods of political crisis. This study focuses on two related fin-de-siècle moments at the turns of the seventeenth century from the late Ming to the early Qing and the twentieth century from the late Qing to the early Republic. Focusing on the reform of narrative discourse, scholars have demonstrated important connections between the late Ming and late Qing periods in the realm of cultural practice. This study not only generally supports the linkage as envisioned in their pioneering studies, but also enriches this cutting-edge framework. More specifically, with a focus on poetry, it builds on the general observation of earlier scholars that romantic impulse, sensationalism, eroticism, and iconoclasm, the salient characteristics of late-Ming culture, extended into the early Qing and even later.

This book charts a history in which sensualist poetry reached an unprecedented and unsurpassed height in the hands of the late Ming poets, experienced a period of hibernation during most of the Qing, and then reemerged to awaken the senses of late-Qing and early-Republican readers. The book demonstrates this cultural continuity in two inseparable parts: First, the disenfranchised literati of the late-Ming period used the marginality of sensual and feminine discursive space to make room for originality and authenticity. Their poetics and politics constituted a vibrant part of the late-Ming countercultural movement against orthodox Neo-Confucianism. Second, echoing their late Ming predecessors, late-Qing and early-Republican sensualist writers had started their anti-Confucian cultural campaign in the “traditional” field of poetry and poetics. This was prior to the well-recognized May Fourth revolt against Confucianism and the blossoming of writings on “private feelings” in modern vernacular Chinese.

Studies of twentieth-century China have vigorously questioned the Western conceptualization of modernity, and problematized the May Fourth paradigm as the center of China’s modernization. Delving into a wide range of rich materials from the late Ming to the early Republican period in the classical shi poetry, an understudied genre in studies of these eras, this project not only joins the efforts of decentering the May Fourth discourse and practice, but also aims to call more attention to the nuances of that which was pushed into the “premodern” past by our “modern” lenses.

“Fragrant and bedazzling” (xiangyan) is a Chinese phrase synonymous with sensual and bewitching feminine beauty and, in literature, eroticism. Sensual literature, even to many scholars today, is morally suspect. Situated in China’s recent past from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century, this study has brought to light a literary tradition and underscored intellectual trends that have been neglected, marginalized, misunderstood, and even condemned. Many scholars have pointed out the centrality of sentiment to China’s process of modernization. Paradoxically, because the rich corpus of the texts under study focus on sensuality and romantic sentiment, they gradually became part of a lost world—a literary past that even present-day scholars sometimes cannot take seriously.

Poetry was the most venerated literary genre in imperial China. How did sensuality seep into poetry, the instrumental genre held by Confucianism in moral cultivation? Why did this process gather momentum during the late Ming and the late-Qing–early-Republican periods? And what were the results? This study argues that an unprecedented outpouring of sensualism—and a body of critical discourse to support it—constituted an attack on the old ideology and an assertion of an alternative literary modernism by way of renewing the marginalized poetics and aesthetics of femininity, sensuality, and romance in China’s distinct tradition. This study is the first to tell the story of how and why sensuality flourished during two fin-de-siècle moments.

The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China reveals a neglected part of history that the freelance intelligentsia that emerged in late imperial and early Republican China countered the political mainstream by drawing on a long yet marginalized tradition of sensual lyricism. Especially important were the works of literati during the last decades of the Ming established a distinctive poetics of individual sensuality that defied Neo-Confucianism. Intelligentsia of the late Qing and early Republican periods revived this tradition in response to the radical cultural transformation, the political corruption of the 1911 Revolution and the Second Revolution of 1913.

The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China will offer the first history of how “fragrant and bedazzling” became a guiding aesthetic of countercultural movements from the late Ming to the early Republican era; roughly, from the late sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. Sensualist poets and other writers of these eras extolled amorous desire and romantic love. Through erotic poetry, they rebelled against not only orthodox Neo-Confucianism but also the radical cultural reform agenda of the late Qing and the New Culture Movement of the Republic. In eras that emphasized sociopolitical functions of literature, they promoted classical lyricism and satisfaction of individual expressive needs. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book argues that sensual lyricism is more political than its sensuous surfaces—and China’s lyrical tradition is sexier and more “modern”—than existing histories have led us to believe. It demonstrates that dominant political ideologies and cultural practices of early modern China always faced counteractions in the form of a discourse of sensuality, femininity, and romance. The general pattern is that the greater the suppression the individual body, the more vibrantly poets promote sensuality and romance as a moral goal in its own right.

This book is original in its sources and its critical framework. Most of its primary sources, especially the monumental anthologies of sensual poetry made in both the late Ming and the late Qing periods, are brought to critical attention for the first time. Bridging literary and intellectual history, the study surveys three hundred years of poetry and essays, from individual collections to voluminous anthologies, and from traditional books to modern magazines. The first half of the book focuses on materials produced during the Ming; the rest examines publications of the turn of the twentieth century. The sources examined in the book show that poetics of sensuality was political on personal and historical levels in and beyond the late imperial period. Sensuality and decadence, the author argues, were forces of literary modernization, as well as an important continuity between the eras often referred to as “premodern” and “modern.” The author also relates Chinese sensual literature to “decadent” movements in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe. In both contexts, while perceived as a reflection of moral decay, decadent literature posed challenges to social and cultural norms by representing the repressed individual body and its cultural expressions. This comparative perspective brings us toward a better understanding of sensualism as a part of modernity.

The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China will be an invaluable resource to scholars of literary and intellectual movements in late imperial and modern China, sexuality, gender, literary decadence, modernism, countercultures, and erotic literature.