Our relationship with things abounds with paradoxes. People assign value
to objects in ways that are often deeply personal or idiosyncratic yet
at the same time rooted in specific cultural and historical contexts.
How do things become meaningful? How do our connections with the world
of things define us? In Ming and Qing China, inquiry into things and
their contradictions flourished, and its depth and complexity belie the
notion that material culture simply reflects status anxiety or class
conflict.
Wai-yee Li traces notions of the pleasures and dangers of things in the
literature and thought of late imperial China. She explores how
aesthetic claims and political power intersect, probes the objective and
subjective dimensions of value, and questions what determines
authenticity and aesthetic appeal. Li considers core oppositions-people
and things, elegance and vulgarity, real and fake, lost and found-to
tease out the ambiguities of material culture. With examples spanning
the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, she shows how
relations with things can both encode and resist social change,
political crisis, and personal loss.
The Promise and Peril of Things reconsiders major works such as The Plum
in the Golden Vase, The Story of the Stone, Li Yu's writings, and Wu
Weiye's poetry and drama, as well as a host of less familiar texts. It
offers new insights into Ming and Qing literary and aesthetic
sensibilities, as well as the intersections of material culture with
literature, intellectual history, and art history.
