What is the place of Li Yu (1611–1680) in Chinese—or even global—cultural history? What can his works offer in our ongoing reflection on what questions we ought to ask in engaging with the past and interpreting historical sources? S. E. Kile’s Towers in the Void: Li Yu and Early Modern Chinese Media offers an exciting interdisciplinary reexamination of Li Yu’s historical significance through the lens of media studies. The Li Yu who emerges in Towers in the Void is always “sharp and fresh” (jianxin 尖新, a favorite term in Li Yu’s own critical vocabulary), expanding and consciously reshaping the boundaries of how we imagine him through the virtuosic deployment of xu 虛 (emptiness) and shi 實 (substance) in the technological-aesthetic innovations central to his mode of media entrepreneurship.

Media studies works on an understanding that “media form the infrastructural basis, the quasi-transcendental condition, for experience and understanding”.Footnote ¹ As a ground for the very possibility of our sense of technological and socio-cultural reality, media thus conceived is fundamental to brokering human experience. Li Yu—a playwright, textual theorist, fiction writer, garden designer, and publisher during the Ming–Qing transition—creates, in Kyle’s words, “the tools not only to rebuild a culture, but to remodel the media in which it was lodged” (276). Though Li Yu frequently appears in studies of seventeenth-century culture, and has been the subject of key monographs,Footnote ² Towers in the Void (henceforth Towers) weaves a fresh conceptualization of his intermedia operations through close textual analysis, providing original insights into this familiar figure.

The “Introduction” lays out the conceptual framework of the study and the centrality of media as both an analytical tool and historical reality, followed by three interwoven parts—“Textual Media,” “Spatial Media,” and “Corporeal Media”—which explore the interplay between books, buildings, and bodies in Li Yu’s work. Each part contains two chapters: Chapter One examines Li Yu’s cultural entrepreneurship through his printing enterprise. Chapter Two, “Building with Words,” shows how Li Yu reimagined writing as a technological activity. Chapter Three, “Fictional Space in Twelve Towers,” investigates a wide range of human-building relationships in one of Li Yu’s story collections. Chapter Four, “Garden Space in Leisure Notes,” shows how Li Yu’s approach to garden design drew on narrative and structural elements that also appear in his fiction and plays. Chapter Five, “Remodeling Fictional Bodies,” analyzes Li Yu’s critical vocabulary around fictional bodies, highlighting “how fiction enables Li Yu to play with the most invasive of procedures on imaginary human bodies” (202). Chapter Six, “Remodeling Real Bodies in Leisure Notes,” continues to explore the body as a key site of play and innovation in Li Yu’s works, conceptualizing the body as a medium open to both representation and technological intervention (238). Li Yu, as Kile reveals, engaged with three kinds of human bodies: “the bodies of purchased persons, in his dramatic practice; of imaginary characters, in his fiction writing; and of his readers, in his nonfiction prose” (202).

The book concludes with an “Epilogue,” which recapitulates the book’s overarching aims, and reflects on the persistence of Li Yu’s media forms—books, buildings, and bodies—in the evolving novelties of our own time (279), along with an “Appendix” offering extensive bibliographical notes on Li Yu’s oeuvre.

Given the centrality of close reading as a critical strategy in the book, it is somewhat regrettable that Towers does not make it easy to follow its argument in conjunction with Li Yu’s original texts. With few exceptions, Towers does not provide the Chinese texts for its citations from Li Yu, and while the book directs readers to an online site built by the author where all the Chinese originals of quoted texts are provided, the citation structure lacks the usual textual markers—such as juan numbers, or the meticulous system of section titles and essay headings that themselves reflect Li Yu’s innovative degree of attention to organizational structures in his works, particularly in the Leisure Notes. Readers not already well-versed in Li Yu’s works will thus find it difficult to situate cited passages within those works’ own larger structure. Such difficulties are only compounded when citations to the same work are scattered across multiple stages of analysis, without clear signal of their shared provenance, or their order in the original composition.

Close reading merges with a vigorous conceptual process in Towers, teasing out moments when media, under Li Yu’s expert remodeling (gaizao 改造), is seen working its magic. Readers will enjoy enchanting cases such as Li Yu’s design of a fan-shaped window on the wall of a boat that creates a two-sided, constantly changing “fan painting” that solves at one stroke “both the problem of originality and the problem of labor” in the art of painting (50); or his poems carved on a tree; his invention of a new indexing system; plays and stories architecturally layered across various narrative levels and scattered with outlandish tales of body-remodeling; and finally, his Leisure Notes, a lovingly curated trove of technological enhancements for everyday life. Even, and especially, readers familiar with Li Yu’s works will be tickled by Kyle’s witty takes, for example, on Li Yu’s endeavors in “waste management” (177) or his depictions of the Creator as a “skinsmith” (227). The delight of such cases is tied to a “forward-looking” (187) Li Yu, as an interpretive pressure informed by modern-day media theory and sensibility is placed on the primary sources. Li Yu’s designs and descriptions are likened to “a sort of premodern version of a neon sign” (182), “a photographic negative” (205), or “a thumb moving on the screen of a smartphone” (278). Li’s rhetorical technique in mapping sex differences can be framed “in cinematic terms” (218); and his novel media forms reflect “the dynamic of our digital media age” (275). If Hans-Georg Gadamer conceived of the distance between past and present horizons of understanding as the limit and necessary precursor to the interpretive process—a negotiation within the space thus opened—Towers is explicit in pursuing a mode of interpretation that arises in the wake of flattening this distance, such that Li Yu appears as our ontological contemporary: “It is in this way that Leisure Notes prescribes modes of being in the world, always advocating modes in which Li Yu is present, through media that might carry him into our homes and our very flesh, remodeling our spaces and our bodies in the process” (273).

Throughout Towers in the Void, Kile’s central argument and concrete interpretations command attention: Li Yu emerges as a new kind of media master, and it is a scholarly imperative to examine him as such. Kile’s close readings and theoretical musings both enchant and inspire, revealing Li Yu as a striking, technologically nuanced figure.