In Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in China, Michael Nylan shines light on the intellectual and cultural history of the Han period by focusing on Yang Xiong's approaches to the Classics and to writing, and on the manner in which they shaped later Han aesthetics and intellectual culture. Yang Xiong is widely (and rightly) regarded as one of the most important intellectual figures of the Han, and Nylan's new study also adds significantly to our understanding of him, as both a producer and a consumer of scholarship and literature. Nylan sets out two main objectives for this study: To “recapture the sense of playfulness that superb stylists of the Han, beginning with Yang Xiong and his peers, brought to morally serious ideas about reading and classical learning” (p. 7), and to “provide a plausible explanation why Yang's particular style of assessing the distant past proved of such enduring appeal to readers over the centuries” (p. 3).

This short study opens with a biographical chapter that examines the various sources for Yang's life, including autobiographical statements. In aggregate, these sources present a portrait of Yang as an impoverished low-ranking official dedicated to scholarship. Chapter 2 sets the intellectual background by charting the evolution of manuscript culture in early China (in three phases) and by identifying the roles of “activist editors.” Nylan then discusses readership in the Han, emphasizing the common association of reading with the pleasure of human companionship. Yang himself cultivated the literary persona of “a classical master who intended to live most fully inside his manuscript rolls, rather than in the courts or schoolrooms of his day” (p. 48). Chapters 3 and 4 form the heart of this study, examining the link between “Playing with Words” (chapter 3) and “Playing with the Ancients” (chapter 4). In chapter 3, Nylan analyzes the use of literary devices such as polysemy, dialogues, and low comedy in Yang Xiong's fu and in his neoclassical classic, Fayan (translated by Nylan as Exemplary Figures [Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming]), and she examines the value of the Classics and Yang's views toward pleasure and the reading of the Classics. Nylan summarizes Yang Xiong's aesthetic belief as the conviction that “the best works balance ornament and substance” (p. 64). She characterizes his valuation of classical learning as the belief that “[t]rue learning consists simply of determining what is right in a given situation. Thus classical learning is mainly to be used in practical situations, in deed or in speech; teaching it to others is not its primary purpose, and far worse is using it merely to procure a career” (p. 73); and that “[t]he inestimable value of classical learning lies in the perfection with which it works upon human nature and the world at large” (p. 90). Despite this serious purpose for the Classics, Nylan asserts, Yang found great pleasure in studying these texts.

Chapter 4 discusses the notion of haogu, or “love of antiquity,” and its role in later Han intellectual and political culture. Through writing history and through exercises in philology and textual collation—especially knowledge of the “philological classics,” such as Cang Jie, and strange characters (qizi)—one could “play with the ancients,” a feat made possible by Yang Xiong's equation of a text with its author. Nylan argues that the restoration of ancient institutions and practices through reading ancient texts, as proposed by the haogu movement, was a cheaper method of establishing political legitimacy for the Han court than public spectacles or wars, and that the efforts of the early Eastern Han emperors to portray themselves as classicists and patrons of scholarship clearly show both an acceptance of Yang's aesthetic views and the successful influence of the movement. Nylan concludes with a brief coda, restating her argument that “For Yang Xiong, the supreme pleasures were undoubtedly the allied pleasures of reading and classical learning” (pp. 125–26), and that “Yang's powerful writings … had succeeded in ascribing to reading the Classics and neoclassics the ineffable power to transport readers into the pleasurable company of the Ancients” (p. 127).

There is much to like in this book, with only a few minor points to take issue with. First, the book contains numerous typographical errors and other problems stemming from the author-produced camera-ready copy (double spaces after periods, straight quotes, etc.). While these problems do not affect the content of the book, they do detract from the pleasure of reading it. My other quibble with the book is that, at 148 pages (including notes and bibliography), it is too short. I wanted more. Nylan's work is full of provocative insights, and in the spirit of her subject matter and Yang Xiong's own “play” with words, she has written a pleasant and playful treatment of a serious topic.