Obscene things : the sexual politics in Jin Ping Mei / Naifei Ding.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ding, Naifei, 1960-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Xiaoxiaosheng. Jin Ping Mei ci hua.

Xiaoxiaosheng.

Sex in literature.

Women in literature.

Physical Description:

xxxi, 333 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2002.

Summary:

In Obscene Things Naifei Ding intervenes in conventional readings of Jin Ping Mei, an early scandalous Chinese novel of sexuality and sexual culture. After first appearing around 1590, Jin Ping Mei was circulated among some of China's best-known writers of the time and subsequently published in three major recensions. A 1695 version by Zhang Zhupo became the most widely read and it is this text in particular on which Ding focuses. Challenging the preconceptions of earlier scholarship, she highlights the fundamental misogyny inherent in Jin Ping Mei and demonstrates how traditional biases -- particularly masculine biases -- continue to inform the concerns of modern criticism and sexual politics. The story of a seductive bondmaid-concubine, sexual opportunism, domestic intrigue, adultery, and death, Jin Ping Mei has often been critiqued based on the coherence of the text itself. Concentrating instead on the processes of reading and on the social meaning of this novel, Ding looks at the various ways the tale has been received since its first dissemination, particularly by critiquing the interpretations offered by seventeenth-century Ming literati and by twentieth-century scholars. Confronting the gender politics of this "pornographic" text, she troubles the boundaries between premodern and modern readings by engaging residual and emergent Chinese gender and hierarchic ideologies.

"In this absorbing study of the multiple lives of a literary classic that is also a popular pornographic text, Naifei Ding steals across the border between cultural studies and feminist/queer literary criticism. Bringing a gendered social history of modern print culture in China into a 'porous intimacy' with both a critique of interpretive power and a feminist 'counter-ethics' of reading, Obscene Things is a scholarly work of exceptional creativity. Ding herself is a wonderful storyteller, and her critical narration of the fortunes of Jin Ping Mei will inspire anyone concerned with the how of studying historical modalities of gender, sexuality, status, and cultural power." -- Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University

Contents:

Part 1 Practices

1. Jin-ology 3

2. The Manic Preface: Jin Shengtan's (1608-1661) Shuihu zhuan 47

3. A Cure for Melancholy: Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610) and Qifa (Seven Stimuli) 81

4. Tears of Ressentiment: Zhang Zhupo's (1670-1698) Jin Ping Mei 117

Part 2 Intervention

5. Seduction: Tiger and Yinfu 143

6. Red Shoes, Foot Bindings, and the Swing 165

7. A Cat, a Dog, and the Killing of Livestock 195

8. Very Close to Yinfu and Enu; or, How Prefaces Matter for Jin Ping Mei (1695) and Enu Shu (Taipei, 1995) 225.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [305]-323) and index.

ISBN:

0822329018

0822329166

OCLC:

48691375