When Lu Xun wrote his influential Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe (A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, 1925), he claimed that fiction in the classical language had reached its apogee with the chuanqi (classical tale) of the Tang. Following the Tang, he maintained, classical fiction had entered a period of long decline while vernacular fiction flourished (Lu Xun only grudgingly accepted the popularity of Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi). As a result, the classical fiction of the Song dynasty and later (with the exception of Liaozhai zhiyi) has been largely ignored by literary scholarship until quite recently. This is of course unfair to the creativity of many authors of classical fiction of the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing, as by now has been pointed out repeatedly. It has also resulted in the almost total neglect of the genre of the classical language novella that was cultivated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The central topic of the classical language novella was love, and a large part of the text of each novella often was taken up by the poems, lyrics and other literary effusions of the characters in which they expressed their intimate emotions. This genre, called “erotic novellas” by Richard Wang, was widely read until the end of the seventeenth century, by which time it was increasingly replaced by the vernacular genre of the caizi jiaren xiaoshuo (scholar and beauty novels). The work under review is the first Western language monograph devoted to this genre. As such it indeed “fills a crucial gap in accepted narratives about the development of traditional Chinese fiction” as stated by Rania Huntington in the book's blurb.

Ming Erotic Novellas consists of five chapters. Following a short first chapter in which the genre of the classical language novella is defined (primarily by its language and length) against the classical language pornographic tale and the vernacular short story, the long second chapter, “Publication and Circulation,” traces the often bewildering printing history of the eight most popular erotic novellas as they were published as independent works, included in fiction miscellanies and fiction anthologies, and printed as independent works once again. This chapter is a major contribution to our knowledge of the print culture of the late Ming. The even longer third chapter, “The Reading Public and Cultural Use,” tries to identify the readership of these texts by gauging the prices of individually printed texts and of the miscellanies and anthologies in which they were included, arguing that the printings of these texts must have been within the reach of a large segment of the literate population. This is largely borne out by the contemporary information on readership, which of course tends to emphasize the circulation of these texts among the fashionable literati of the day. The chapter continues with a consideration of the cultural uses of these books, and concludes by discussing the inclusion of letters taken from these erotic novellas in the letter writing manuals of the late Ming.

The final two chapters deal with the contents of these novellas. “Eroticism in the Novellas and Society” places these texts against the background of the “cult of qing (emotion/passion/love)” in the late Ming, and traces thematic developments in these novellas: as we proceed in time, the number of female partners of a single male protagonist tends to increase (from one to thirty), and the sex becomes kinkier as later novellas describe trios and group sex. By contrast, other novellas play up the chastity of the male and female lovers. The final chapter, “Religious Dimensions,” deals first with Daoist allusions in these stories and next with the theme of “double desire” for sexual satisfaction and eventual transcendence. Whereas some stories allow the husband and his partner(s) to live to a ripe old age as the parents of sons, other novellas conclude by allowing the male protagonist and his womenfolk to join the immortals.

The author states in the very first line of his introduction (p. 3) that the object of his study is “late Ming material culture,” so it may be unfair to criticize him for the limited interest he shows in the literary aspects of the texts he studies. But he repeatedly disparages the literary value of the genre he studies, insisting on the novellas' “relatively poor literary value” (p. 8). He nowhere tries to explain how these “not-great works” (p. 62) could continue to enjoy such a wide popularity, and he also makes no attempt to differentiate in quality between individual novellas. The decision to focus on eight selected novellas is determined by their popularity (that is, the number of known reprints) and not their quality. In my opinion, this monograph would have benefited from a more developed first chapter, one that provided a more extended introduction to the genre and a preliminary literary analysis of at least a few selected texts so as to explain the fascination of these texts for contemporary readers.