Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2025.
How was drama experienced in early modern China? It was not tied to a single medium such as the page or the stage, but operated in a media ecology—an environment in which it integrated other arts and media while being constantly refashioned in a variety of arts and media. This book takes us beyond the page-stage dichotomy in drama studies to explore a wide range of cultural experimentation that it collectively terms “playing with plays:” the theatrical experience folded into commentary, the poetic and visual imagination arising from drama illustrations that resemble a pictorial album, the interactions between reading and singing arias, the imbrication of reading plays and practicing religion, and the ludic act of writing playful essays on drama. The book develops a synthetic inquiry into these disparate phenomena by bringing them into dialogues with the heuristic potential of media theory. By closely analyzing canonical as well as peripheral materials through a consistent lens of media studies, the book advances a new model for thinking about drama history, and explores the entwinement of plays and different forms of media in shaping perception, molding experience, and enabling new subject positions to emerge in early modern China. It also provokes a critical reflection on medium/media as historically specific and broader than modern mass media technology.
“Poetic ‘Hypertext,’ Evocative ‘Figure in Landscape,’ and the Reading of Illustrated Plays in the Late Ming,” East Asian Publishing and Society (2024): 1-62. Article Link.
This article sheds new light on the "scenic" shift in book illustration of the seventeen century through investigating the Hangzhou publisher Rongyu tang’s subtle reconfiguration of the tripartite relationships of figure, landscape, and poetic caption. I argue that the RYT developed its own repertoire of “figures in landscape” that, while intersecting with visual motifs in a wide range of paintings and prints, distinguish themselves through the fine-tuning of the relative size of figure to landscape and the integrating of poetic “hypertexts.” Through close examination of three figure types—traveler, fisherman, and female performer—in landscape, I show that the images gave rise to a poetically recollective, visually evocative, and culturally contextualized mode of reading that appealed to varying levels of knowledge and interests. They afforded readers the flexibility to immerse in the atmosphere or emotions of select scenes, to reflect on the overarching themes of the plays, or to take an imaginative flight out of drama to appreciate the images’ broader poetic and visual associations.
“Constructing a Playful Space: Eight-Legged Essays on Xixiang ji and Pipa ji,” T’oung Pao 102: 4-5 (2016), 503-545. Article Link.
This article examines the “playful eight-legged essay” as a form of literary parody and discusses its circulation in printed editions of The Story of the Western Wing and The Lute in late imperial China. The rise of the playful eight-legged essay was part of a philosophical and literary tradition of “game-playing,” and occurred in the context of publications that appropriated canonical genres for fashionable entertainment. Reading the playful compositions against the generic conventions of the standard examination essay, on the one hand, and the original drama commentary, on the other, I explore the playful eight-legged essay as an increasingly autonomous mode of critical commentary that was independent from, yet still associated with, the dramatic text. Employing dramatic impersonation, the essays opened up a playful space for the staging of passion and extended the appeal of the original play by involving the reader in its imaginative performance.
Co-edited with Malina Stefanovska and Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge. Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850: Between East and West. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
This volume of essays explores the distinct representations of emotions and passions in conventionally understudied genres such as journals, memoirs, conduct manuals, and correspondences in early modern Asia and Europe.
"The Story of The Western Wing with Vermilion-Ink Annotations (Zhuding Xixiang ji) as Hypermedia: Rethinking the Elegant (ya) and the Common (su) in Early Modern China," in Everyday Archives: Vernacular Literature and the Spread of Knowledge in Early Modern China, edited by Rainier Lanselle and Rolan Altenburger (Paris: Collège de France, OpenEdition Books, forthcoming 2025). See a presentation of this project.
This chapter explores the “hypermedial” illustration in The Story of the Western Wing with Vermilion-Ink Annotations (Zhuding Xixiang ji 硃訂西廂記), an understudied edition of The Western Wing published in the late Ming. Through the experimentation with media, the illustrations achieved a distinctive synthesis of the “elegant” (ya 雅) and the “common” (su 俗) cultures in early modern China. They afforded new ways of experiencing The Western Wing that differed from the appreciation of it in elite discourses or the playful use of it in everyday circumstances.
“Introduction,” co-authored with Malina Stefanovska, in Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850: Between East and West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 3-11.
An introduction that interrogates the notion of "emotion" as it was historically and culturally encoded in non-fictional genres. Discussion of different "regimes" of affect in the East and West and some general themes in the book.
“How to Manage Emotions in ‘The Classic of Whoring’,” in Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850: Between East and West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 95-112.
A study of the instructions about managing the vagaries of qing in the brothel manual Piaojing that are juxtaposed with courtesans’ poetry in the an anthology Qinglou yinyu (Stylistic Verses from the Green Bower).
The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection, by Zhang Yingyu; translated by Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC) Resource Center (August 2018): http://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/yinghui-wu/
Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Yuming He (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 37 (2015), 208-211.
This study of the late Ming theater aficionado Pan Zhiheng 潘之恒 (1556–1622) argues that Pan sought to document an unrepeatable, site-specific media experience at the convergence of one’s feeling body and the contingencies of location and environment. I argue that Pan's writings invite a rethinking of “media” that encompasses the atmospheric, the ambient, and the elemental.
Reading my sources against the valorization and aestheticization of performer-patron relationship in late Ming, I delve into stories about the broken bonds between performers and their patrons in literature, legal cases, and private correspondences in this period. The findings in this study reveal hidden realities underlying this much-celebrated relationship and shed new light on the conceptions of permanence and evanescence, the boundaries between self and other, constructions of gender and sexuality, the politics of patronage, and the social history of acting.
Article Link.
A study of a kind of pleasure-seeking and cautionary verses that circulated in vernacular short stories, dramas, and daily-use encyclopedias. Questions addressed include the flow and refashioning of information across different communicative contexts, the new roles of verse that traversed the divide between poetics and prosaics in imaginary world-making.