This essay explores different seventeenth-century accounts of the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644--Chinese vernacular novels and literati memoirs, Jesuit histories, and Dutch poetry and plays--to investigate a develo...This essay explores different seventeenth-century accounts of the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644--Chinese vernacular novels and literati memoirs, Jesuit histories, and Dutch poetry and plays--to investigate a developing notion of openness in both Europe and China. In Europe, the idea of openness helped to construct an early-modern global order based on the free flow of material goods, religious beliefs, and shared information. In these accounts, China＇s supposed refusal to open itself to the world came to represent Europe＇s Other, an obstacle to the liberal global order. In doing so, however, European accounts drew on Chinese popular sources that similarly embraced openness, albeit openness of a different kind, that is the direct and unobstructed communication between ruler and subject. This is not to say that Chinese late-Ming accounts of the fall of the Ming are the source of European ideals of liberalism, but rather to suggest that, at a crucial early-modern moment of globalization, European authors misapprehended late-Ming ideals of enlightened imperial rule so as to consolidate their own worldview, foreclosing late-Ming ideals in the process.展开更多
Much scholarly work on the literary culture of the early Qing dynasty has focused on notions of memory, trauma, and nostalgia. In contrast, this essay investigates the ＂contemporary operas＂ （shishi xiqu） of the se...Much scholarly work on the literary culture of the early Qing dynasty has focused on notions of memory, trauma, and nostalgia. In contrast, this essay investigates the ＂contemporary operas＂ （shishi xiqu） of the seventeenth-century Suzhou playwright Li Yu to argue for the importance of the notion of＂the present day.＂ How is this notion of the present day given dramatic form in Li Yu＇s operas and what implications does this interest in the contemporary have for the broader cultural scene of the early Qing dynasty？ This paper will answer these questions by investigating one dramatic technique favored by Li Yu： the inclusion of snippets of rumor and ＂news＂ reports into the play. By including such contemporary media reports, Li Yu not only generates a constantly evolving sense of the present, he also projects this sense of immediacy beyond the fiction of the stage into the ＂reality＂ of the audience, creating a form of opera eminently suited for both reflecting and producing local Suzhou activism, as evidenced in Li Yu＇s most famous work, Qing zhong pu （Registers of the pure and loyal）, a work chronicling the popular Suzhou protests of the mid-1620s and Wanli yuan （Reunion over ten thousand miles）, which stages the dissolution and reintegration of family and empire right after the fall of the Ming.展开更多
文摘This essay explores different seventeenth-century accounts of the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644--Chinese vernacular novels and literati memoirs, Jesuit histories, and Dutch poetry and plays--to investigate a developing notion of openness in both Europe and China. In Europe, the idea of openness helped to construct an early-modern global order based on the free flow of material goods, religious beliefs, and shared information. In these accounts, China＇s supposed refusal to open itself to the world came to represent Europe＇s Other, an obstacle to the liberal global order. In doing so, however, European accounts drew on Chinese popular sources that similarly embraced openness, albeit openness of a different kind, that is the direct and unobstructed communication between ruler and subject. This is not to say that Chinese late-Ming accounts of the fall of the Ming are the source of European ideals of liberalism, but rather to suggest that, at a crucial early-modern moment of globalization, European authors misapprehended late-Ming ideals of enlightened imperial rule so as to consolidate their own worldview, foreclosing late-Ming ideals in the process.
文摘Much scholarly work on the literary culture of the early Qing dynasty has focused on notions of memory, trauma, and nostalgia. In contrast, this essay investigates the ＂contemporary operas＂ （shishi xiqu） of the seventeenth-century Suzhou playwright Li Yu to argue for the importance of the notion of＂the present day.＂ How is this notion of the present day given dramatic form in Li Yu＇s operas and what implications does this interest in the contemporary have for the broader cultural scene of the early Qing dynasty？ This paper will answer these questions by investigating one dramatic technique favored by Li Yu： the inclusion of snippets of rumor and ＂news＂ reports into the play. By including such contemporary media reports, Li Yu not only generates a constantly evolving sense of the present, he also projects this sense of immediacy beyond the fiction of the stage into the ＂reality＂ of the audience, creating a form of opera eminently suited for both reflecting and producing local Suzhou activism, as evidenced in Li Yu＇s most famous work, Qing zhong pu （Registers of the pure and loyal）, a work chronicling the popular Suzhou protests of the mid-1620s and Wanli yuan （Reunion over ten thousand miles）, which stages the dissolution and reintegration of family and empire right after the fall of the Ming.
