Maram Epstein

Literati identity and its fictional representations in late imperial China

Introduction Part I. The Image of the Literati in Qing Discourse: 1. Literati identity and the Qing epistemological crisis 2. Discourses of the literati and the literati in discourse 3. The intellectual milieus of three novelists Part II. The Deconstruction of Literati Identity in Rulin Waishi: 4. Scholars, poets, painters and essayists 5. The decline of literati mores 6. The use and abuse of ritual Part III. Fictional Reconstruction of Literati Identity: 7. Yesou Puyan: a Confucian-feminist utopia? 8. The philological musings of Jinghua Yuan Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index.

Writing Emotions: Ritual Innovation as Emotional Expression

This article examines the chronological biographies of the Qing ritualists Yan Yuan (1635-1704) and Li Gong (1659-1733) to witness how they negotiated and wrote about the ritual and emotional priorities in their relationships with various family members. It argues that rather than being just a form of ritual duty, filial piety was a core emotion at the center of many peoples affective and spiritual lives. Although the conservative nature of nianpu (chronological biography) as a genre meant that some of the most intimate relationships in these two mens lives would get passed over in silence, the recording of their manipulation of ritual forms allowed them an indirect means of expressing their affective bonds.

Reflections of desire: the poetics of gender in "Dream of the Red Chamber".

Woven into the structure of the Dream of the Red Chamber is an exploration of the self-expressive values associated with the late imperial cult of qing and an explicit warning about the self-destructive potential of desire. Rather than being rooted in biological sex, Cao Xueqins polysemous use of gender reflects the competing visions of Confucian orthodoxy and the cult of qing. This paper analyzes the structural and ideological values associated with masculine and feminine in Dream to argue that manipulation of gendered identities was an explicit aspect of the poetics of eighteenth-century xiaoshuo fiction.

The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (review)

The seventeenth-century Chinese literati imagination swarmed with ghosts. These beings and their phantom sisters—souls, fox spirits, dreams, painted images, and mirror reflections—are the ultimate border crossers; they regularly dissolve the boundaries that delineate time, place, reason, body, consciousness, and life itself. As cultural constructs, since their only function is to represent absence and yearning, they are free from the burden of the mimetic. Ghosts are intimately related to changing beliefs about the connections between body, mind, and identity. They are also linked to the rich culture of death and mourning in traditional China. Indeed, Judith Zeitlin’s ambitious exploration in The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature demonstrates that ghosts are neither marginal nor liminal; they are seen and heard everywhere in Chinese culture. The passionate interest of the Chinese in ghosts continues into the twenty-first century, as seen by the phantom images that haunt contemporary East Asian media productions. In The Phantom Heroine, Zeitlin argues that, during the seventeenth century, ghosts, even as projections of a living person’s imagination, took on a life of their own as agents in the production of new identities and cultural meanings; deeply coded as yin, they became an idealized expression of the feminine. They became the ultimate embodiment of qing 情 (a term that carried such a broad range of meanings during the late imperial period that it is notoriously difficult to translate; its most common meanings include emotion, passion, sentiment, and a fascination with the subjective), as both the expression of emotion and a means to induce corresponding feelings in others. As revenants of the past, they enabled a dramatization of the themes of memory, nostalgia, and the work of mourning. During this golden age of Chinese theater, the presence of ghosts on stage posed a metatheatrical commentary on questions of performativity. In addition, as disembodied forces that exist to voice the unresolved emotions of a life that ended in grief,