As a worldly-minded polymath and maverick writer in his own time, Li Yu 李漁 (1611–80) has captured modern scholarly attention probably since his rediscovery by the May Fourth generation in early-twentieth-century China. Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) and Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–1967), for example, lauded his belles-lettres as one of the precursors to a modern ideal of self-expression. More recently, his inventive energy has been compellingly introduced to an English-speaking readership by Patrick Hanan (1927–2014). Hanan's magisterial study and translations of Li Yu, which cover some of his finest fiction, drama, and essays, remain key points of reference.
Building on this long line of scholarship, S.E. Kile's new monograph breathes fresh life into the agency of this literary icon. Kile illuminates in particular Li Yu's creativity in the broader context of media ecology that informed his protean cultural endeavours. Our “Master in the Bamboo Hat” (Liweng 笠翁), a sobriquet that became Li's best-known brand name in the aftermath of the catastrophic Ming–Qing dynastic transition, took off against the current. According to Kile, Li's success owed much to his ability to translate the surviving media infrastructure into new possibilities for reconnection. In navigating a diversified market for entertaining and practical knowledge in the mid- to late seventeenth century, he adapted his writing to a set of media forms that appealed to his urban public. At the centre were woodblock-printed books, architectural constructs, and human bodies, with which he took pains to experiment to mediate real and fictional worlds. Language was the building block of his experimentation. The resulting bestsellers – whether narrative, expository, theatrical, or poetic – channelled his imaginative ideas for remodelling the tangible environment into the lived everyday experiences of his audience. By relating the rich literary content of Li Yu's oeuvre to specific material forms of mediation and delivery, Kile sheds new light on the techniques of cultural innovation of the day. This thorough, daring inquiry into how Li Yu embodied an early modern mode of cultural entrepreneurship, therefore, puts literary studies in conversation with book history, media studies, and material culture.
Divided into three parts that correspond to the themes of textual, spatial, and corporeal media, the book does not follow a chronological order. Rather, Kile organizes his analyses along the interpretive paths opened up by Leisure Notes (Xianqing ouji 閒情偶寄), Li Yu's crowning manual on how to live a good life across media. In the process, a whole spectrum of Li's fictional and non-fictional works, together with their references, is evoked to illustrate his intermedial strategies. Chapter 1 lays out how Li Yu made his name in woodblock printing as a cultural entrepreneur. By zooming in on Li's tinkering with print media, this chapter reorients the persistent issue of reproducibility – one that had plagued the market for cultural production – towards new technological designs proposed and practised in Li's own publishing projects. Particularly dramatized in his play A Much-Desired Match (Yizhong yuan 意中緣), which renders late-Ming luminaries’ demand for ghostpainting, the challenge of transmitting reproducible yet personalized experiences of novelty loomed large. Kile unravels how such stress propelled Li Yu to develop unprecedented innovations including those in illustration, paper, and indexing for reading. Chapter 2 delves deeper into Li's reimagining of the material conditions of writing as a medium. Starting with his often-neglected poems that reacted to the toll of the dynastic cataclysm, Kile reads Li Yu's attentiveness to the fragility of written words as a catalyst for his media-minded literary invention. One of the most salient contributions is his theorization of playwriting. The remainder of the chapter leads us into the heart of Leisure Notes, where Li Yu envisions theatre as a composite art meant to co-ordinate distinctive registers of spoken dialogue and sung arias on a shared ground. How to improve the practice of the human body for performance is the key. By extension, on the premise that literacy, as “an embodied skill” (p. 90), can govern different media of configuration, it is argued that Li drives home the adaptable potential of writing in a tangible, accessible world. This material approach to writing, which fleshes out the classical hermeneutics of wen 文 as “manifested patterns”, underlies Li Yu's intervention. It also accounts for the abundant use of architectural and bodily analogies in Leisure Notes.
The idea that a playwright works in a mode resonant with that of a builder impels Kile to explore Li Yu's full engagement with building in the two following chapters. Chapter 3 focuses on the role of architectural buildings in Li's short story collection Twelve Towers (Shi'er lou 十二樓). Beyond merely providing settings, Kile holds that the titular buildings function as “actants” on varying levels of storytelling, hence transforming the collection into a genre-redefining narrative space. Close readings unravel how the figure of material dwelling not only mediates the frame, fictional characters’ motives, and the arcs of storylines in all their complexity, but also connects the narrator's voice to the author's on a meta level. Chapter 4 complements the previous chapter by discussing Li Yu's innovations in garden design for real space. As a versatile artist emerging from the burgeoning late-Ming garden culture, Li articulates and promulgates novel strategies of spatial reconfiguration charged with immersive effects in Leisure Notes. The immersiveness of these ingenious designs, Kile argues, derives from their underlying principles of fiction making and theatre staging at which Li is adept. As such, he departs from the professional garden designer Ji Cheng's 計成 (1582–1642) manual modelled on the conventional lyricism of poetry and painting. Many of the examples delicately elucidated throughout this chapter – such as placard inscribing, window lattice design, and the practice of “borrowing scenes” (i.e. expanding the use of interior windows to frame both exterior landscapes and hanging paintings) – showcase Li Yu's intermedial orchestration of garden-visiting experiences anew. He achieved this through concrete language, further aided by his own printed illustrations. The deployment of words and images affords readers a portal into an “alternative temporality” (p. 185) subject to customization, while simultaneously foregrounding the reproducible quality of our worldly creator's vision on paper.
Moving forward, Kile burrows into how Li Yu conceives of the human body as the central medium for technological modification. Chapter 5 focuses on Li's fictional portrayals of the gendered body open to graphically imaginative fashioning and remodelling. Through the prism of a plurality of his writings that include the erotic novel Carnal Prayer Mat (Rou putuan 肉蒲團), vernacular short stories from the Twelve Towers and Silent Operas (Wusheng xi 無聲戲), and adapted southern plays, this chapter excavates an array of recurring corporeal vocabularies and tropes in their intertextual contexts. Li Yu's attentiveness to the ways body parts can be altered with tools attests to the “technicity” of the flesh (p. 203), through which the visceral and social worlds are mediated. Chapter 6 returns to Leisure Notes, centring on the sections that advertise Li's real-life advice on body cultivation. Particularly, how to manage the aesthetic bodies of female concubines/performers, purchased by men, and the competent bodies of male readers themselves comes to the fore. Rather than simply assert or deny a preconceived hierarchy of gender and class, though, Li Yu's approach to the body complicates conventional wisdom. His proposals always explore new potentials for nurturing physical bodies in their mediating environments, and hence advocate an “aesthetic of function” (p. 271). Before the modern advent of plastic surgery, cosmetic and fashion industries, and life coaching and counselling, Li Yu undoubtedly stood at the forefront, prescribing for his readership how to make the body a better actualization of the self in constant mediation with others.
Kile concludes his penetrating and nuanced readings in the epilogue by reiterating Li Yu's media-savvy entrepreneurship at an early modern juncture. Instead of endorsing an evolutionary narrative of media history, Kile proposes that the case study of Li Yu can offer new insights into the “old” media technologies we have long taken for granted (p. 275). The familiar forms of print, buildings, and bodies, guided by Li's brush, provide productive venues for recreating fresh multimedia experiences. Across the real and the fictional, Li Yu reactivates the life-giving power of words operative in tangible processes of cultural mediation. This makes him a “cultural mediator” (p. 279) transmitting the otherwise ineffable to his public.
Given the overarching scope of the study, Kile's sophisticated, absorbing readings run through each chapter. A brief summary cannot fully do them justice. Readers new to Li Yu's compositions may initially find it difficult to keep up with the rapid progression of interconnected texts upon which uncannily sharp interpretations unfold. Nonetheless, following through is rewarding. One formatting issue that needs to be addressed is the occasional mixed use of in-text and footnote citations. Perhaps with the primary goal of shortening the book, Kile has moved all the original prose quotations to a well-designed supplementary website (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/liweng/). Accidentally or not, this design invites us to read digitized Chinese texts alongside their hard-copy English translations on a transmedia plane. Li Yu might have appreciated this twist.
