Wai-yee Li's Books

The Promise and Peril of Things

Literature and Material Culture in Late Imperial China

By: Wai-yee Li

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The Promise and Peril of Things

Literature and Material Culture in Late Imperial China

By: Wai-yee Li

Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Our relationship with things abounds with paradoxes. People assign value to objects in ways that are often deeply personal or idiosyncratic yet at the same time rooted in specific cultural and historical contexts. How do things become meaningful? How do our connections with the world of things define us? In Ming and Qing China, inquiry into things and their contradictions flourished, and its depth and complexity belie the notion that material culture simply reflects status anxiety or class conflict. Wai-yee Li traces notions of the pleasures and dangers of things in the literature and thought of late imperial China. She explores how aesthetic claims and political power intersect, probes the objective and subjective dimensions of value, and questions what determines authenticity and aesthetic appeal. Li considers core oppositions—people and things, elegance and vulgarity, real and fake, lost and found—to tease out the ambiguities of material culture. With examples spanning the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, she shows how relations with things can both encode and resist social change, political crisis, and personal loss. The Promise and Peril of Things reconsiders major works such as The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Story of the Stone, Li Yu’s writings, and Wu Weiye’s poetry and drama, as well as a host of less familiar texts. It offers new insights into Ming and Qing literary and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as the intersections of material culture with literature, intellectual history, and art history.

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Page Count

213

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231553897

ISBN 13

9780231553896

Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

By: Wai-yee Li

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Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

By: Wai-yee Li

The Ming–Qing dynastic transition in seventeenth-century China was an epochal event that reverberated in Qing writings and beyond; political disorder was bound up with vibrant literary and cultural production. Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature focuses on the discursive and imaginative space commanded by women. Encompassing writings by women and by men writing in a feminine voice or assuming a female identity, as well as writings that turn women into a signifier through which authors convey their lamentation, nostalgia, or moral questions for the fallen Ming, the book delves into the mentality of those who remembered or reflected on the dynastic transition, as well as those who reinvented its significance in later periods. It shows how history and literature intersect, how conceptions of gender mediate the experience and expression of political disorder. Why and how are variations on themes related to gender boundaries, female virtues, vices, agency, and ethical dilemmas used to allegorize national destiny? In pursuing answers to these questions, Wai-yee Li explores how this multivalent presence of women in different genres provides a window into the emotional and psychological turmoil of the Ming–Qing transition and of subsequent moments of national trauma. 2016 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, Pre-1900 Category, China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies

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Page Count

653

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

1684170761

ISBN 13

9781684170760

The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy

By: Stephen Durrant,Wai-yee Li,Michael Nylan,Hans van Ess

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The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy

By: Stephen Durrant,Wai-yee Li,Michael Nylan,Hans van Ess

Sima Qian (first century BCE), the author of Record of the Historian (Shiji), is China’s earliest and best-known historian, and his “Letter to Ren An” is the most famous letter in Chinese history. In the letter, Sima Qian explains his decision to finish his life’s work, the first comprehensive history of China, instead of honorably committing suicide following his castration for “deceiving the emperor.” In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some scholars have queried the authenticity of the letter. Is it a genuine piece of writing by Sima Qian or an early work of literary impersonation? The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy provides a full translation of the letter and uses different methods to explore issues in textual history. It also shows how ideas about friendship, loyalty, factionalism, and authorship encoded in the letter have far-reaching implications for the study of China.

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Page Count

193

Publisher

University of Washington Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0295806389

ISBN 13

9780295806389

Book's by Wai-yee Li

The Promise and Peril of Things

The Promise and Peril of Things

Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy

The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy

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