Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei - Softcover

Naifei Ding

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822329166 ISBN 13: 9780822329169

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2002

Synopsis

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 was 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.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"Ding's reading of Jin Ping Mei is unique and extremely important. By reading this novel as a cumulative accretion of text and commentary and as a cultural icon, she shows how all of us who read it from an aesthetic perspective are implicated in covering up its disturbing and hatefully misogynist core. This is a true coup."— Maram Epstein, University of Oregon

"Those who read Ding's investigation will never look at critical interpretations of Chinese fiction with the same complacency again."—Robert E. Hegel, author of Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China

"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

From the Back Cover:

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0822329166
• ISBN 13: 9780822329169
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368