Interviews with Scholars of the Ming

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure.

2 煤客劉祥墓誌銘, in Li Kaixian quan ji 李開先全集, 3 vols., ed. Bu Jian 卜鍵 (北京：文化藝術出版社, 2004), 594–5.

3 Asia Major, Third Series, vol. 8, no. 2 (1995): 107–46.

4 See “Three Ming Dynasty Martyrs and their Monstrous Mothers-in-Law.” Ming Studies 68 (2013): 5–32.

5 See Carlitz, “The Social Uses of Female Virtue,” 131.

6 The Jesuits were prominent at the Ming court when Hui tu Lienü zhuan was being compiled, so it’s not surprising to see the wife of Zhao Yuankai echoing the European motif of St. Sebastian in a hail of arrows – and St. Sebastian himself has been the subject of at least one homoerotic movie, Derek Jarman’s 1976 Sebastiane. See HTLNZ 7.316–18.

7 “Lovers, Talkers, Monsters, and Good Women.” In Beyond Exemplar Tales: New Approaches to Chinese Women, edited by Joan Judge and Hu Ying. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011, 175–92.

8 See Arthur Waley, tr., The Book of Songs (Grove Press, 1996), p.65.

9 Mencius, Translated by D. C. Lau. Penguin Books, 1970, 108.

10 Fang Jie points out that Liu’s intent is actually the same as Yuan Zheng’s; both tales ultimately advocate self-restraint.

11 The collection is discussed in Hanan, Chinese Vernacular Story, 56–57

12 These are Hanan, Chinese Short Story, 197, Hung 3 and Hung 8. I discuss this pair of nearly identical stories in “Three Ming Dynasty Martyrs and Their Murderous Mothers-in-Law.” Ming Studies 68 (2013): 16–18.

13 1572 Haizhou zhi. See my “Lovers, Talkers,” 187, n. 47.

14 Late Imperial China 12, no. 2 (1991): 117–52.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paola Zamperini

Paola Zamperini has a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature and Women and Gender Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She went to Northwestern University in Summer 2013 as the founding chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at NU and Associate Professor of Chinese Literature, after a decade at Amherst College. Her research and pedagogical trajectories aim to create learning environments imprinted by the methodologies and approaches of gender and sexuality studies, and intersectional feminism, whilst preserving and deepening engagement with Chinese and East Asian cultural traditions, past and present. To date, she has written about pornography, female suicide, prostitution, gambling and fashion theory in Ming and Qing fiction.

Katherine Carlitz

Katherine Carlitz received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, with a dissertation on the role of drama in the Ming dynasty novel Jin ping mei. In her book The Rhetoric of Jin ping mei, she analyzes the interweaving of gender, genre, sex, and politics in this major social novel of the late Ming. With Robert Hegel, she co-edited the anthology Writing and Law in Late Imperial China, where her contribution focused on legal issues in the late Qing. Her current project, “Ambiguous Heroines,” studies the complexities of gender construction in Ming dynasty fiction, drama, pornography, and law.