Erotic Novellas as an Early Modern Reading Tradition: Emotion, Materiality, and Literacy

Description

Chinese erotic novellas from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries are romantic tales that depict extended courtship culminating in marriage, ultimately reinforcing the structure of the Confucian household. Written in a register of plain classical Chinese, these tales are densely interspersed with verse—often more than a hundred pieces per story—so much so that poetry frequently overshadows the narrative itself. While scholars have often dismissed these texts as minor or subpar literary works, this study reconsiders them as a self-referential reading tradition. Housed in sixteenth-century miscellanies that arranged texts of different genres in upper and lower panels on each page, these stories derive their narrative momentum primarily from poetic exchanges. In doing so, they prioritize a communal reading experience grounded in emotional resonance over conventional storytelling. The abundance of lyrical and expository content enables readers to traverse multiple cultural registers within the literary tradition while following the often-intricate progressions of romantic relationships. Central to these plots are the exchanges of poetry, letters, and material objects, which function as interpretive nodes. In particular, the gifted items invoke idiosyncratic references to their materiality, conjuring rich hermeneutic fields rooted in shared affect. Herein lies the early modernity of this reading tradition: tailored to leisured reading practices that privileged novelty over moral rectitude, these tales cultivated an eclectic foundation of literacy that demonstrated the generative power of reading in shaping textual forms.

Speaker

Xiaoqiao Ling, Associate Professor of Chinese at Arizona State University, specializes in late imperial Chinese literature with a focus on performance texts, vernacular fiction, print culture, and reading practices. She has published in both Chinese and English on topics including fiction and drama commentary, legal imagination in literature, and memory and trauma in 17th-century China. She is the author of Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019) and editor of Minor Discourses: Aesthetics of the Everyday (National Taiwan University Press, 2024).