Xiaoqiao Ling compares several Sanyan stories with the full-length novel Xingshi yinyuan zhuan , especially in the context of seventeenth-century print culture and the social practice of merit-accumulation, to show how the two genres differ in their representation of law. The Sanyan stories target both an imagined, illiterate mass audience and the sophisticated literatus reader; they thus adopt the storyteller’s voice to educate the former and provide marginal commentary to address the literate elite. Set in everyday reality, the courtroom stands out as a fictional space where retributive calculations are carried out to fulfill the mandate of Heaven. By contrast, Xingshi yinyuan zhuan removes the storyteller’s voice and invokes multiple moral discourses to explore the limitations of law as a human institution. Morality, Ling concludes, is a fluid field shaped not only by the contemporary intellectual debates but also by the audience that the author anticipates.
Unlike Zhu Suchen's 朱素臣 (1621?–after 1701) other extant chuanqi plays that survive only in manuscripts, Qinlou yue 秦樓月 (The Moon Shining upon the Qin Tower) was printed in a deluxe woodblock edition during the Kangxi period. This carefully executed imprint features an array of paratextual elements: preface; illustrations with matching poems by prominent seventeenth-century literati figures; a poetry collection by Chen Susu 陳素素, a Yangzhou courtesan cast as the heroine of the play; and an appendix with women writers' poems commenting on Susu's poetry and portrait. Such a design points to an editorial choice to stage both a male-centered literati reading community and a cohort of women writers from the Jiangnan area who gather to celebrate women's literary talent on the book page. By examining how these two bodies of readers reach a sense of solidarity in distinctive ways, this article aims at a better understanding of the xinxi 新戲 (new plays) of Suzhou as an important regional phenomenon of cultural production. Qinlou yue in the book's physical form makes use of the realms of both commercial and private printing to appeal to Ming loyalist sentiments widespread among the southern elite, and to embrace a new sense of womanhood epitomized by women writers and readers who had achieved iconic status in the Jiangnan region.
Further Adventures on the Journey to the West (Xiyou bu, 1641) is a quintessential literati novella that has inspired critical investigations in disciplines such as formal realism, structuralist narratology, psychological realism, stream-of-consciousness, and dream interpretation. This paper examines how the novella, in the form of a printed book, facilitated a reading experience of the text as a Buddhist allegory for readers’ self-interrogation, recognition, and alteration. Spectatorship plays a key role in readers’ experience of literature in its cognitive capacity: if Monkey as an allegory of the mind is the subject enacted by the text constantly positioned as a spectator of his own dreamscape, the subject enacted by the reader observes Monkey’s journey as a performative terrain sustained by historical and social imaginaries. In addition, illustrations function as a paratextual device that forges new image-text relationships to transcend the linear narrative, thereby altering one’s textual knowledge as part of the reading experience. By investigating the act of seeing that transpires on three levels, this study hopes to gain insight on a gnostic experience between seventeenth-century readers and the xiaoshuo narrative as literary and material artifact.
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