The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China

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 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.

“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. 

This book 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. 

The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China reveals a neglected part of history during which the freelance intelligentsia, who 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.

Original in its sources and its critical framework, The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China offers 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. 

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 un...