Monthly Archives: April 9, 2016

Censure and Celebration: Jiang Xingge Re-Encounters His Pearl Shirt

  One of the most acclaimed 话本 (hua ben – vernacular short stories) in Feng Menglong’s 1620 collection Stories Old and New (tr. Yang Shuhui and Yang Yunqin). We discuss the question of irony in a story about both marital and extramarital bliss, and explore the reasons behind the story’s famously racy details.         […]

Of Gods and Telescopes: Li Yu’s A Tower for the Summer Heat

Want a shortcut to immortality? Get a telescope! Or at least that’s the scenario posed by Li Yu’s classic 1657 story Tower for the Summer Heat《夏宜樓》. We’ll also take a closer look at the notions of cultural “inside” and “outside” spaces that inform Chinese social discourse to this day.         http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Tower_for_the_Summer_Heat.mp3