"Wai-yee Li asks fundamental questions about the relationship between aesthetics and politics as categories of experience and significance by exploring the intersections of material culture, aesthetics, literature, and intellectual history in the late Ming and High Qing (late sixteenth to mid eighteenth century). While prevailing theories see the rise of aesthetic culture during this period to be connected to perceived threat to elites from a rising mercantile class, Li sees see the discourse of taste as being driven by ...
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"Wai-yee Li asks fundamental questions about the relationship between aesthetics and politics as categories of experience and significance by exploring the intersections of material culture, aesthetics, literature, and intellectual history in the late Ming and High Qing (late sixteenth to mid eighteenth century). While prevailing theories see the rise of aesthetic culture during this period to be connected to perceived threat to elites from a rising mercantile class, Li sees see the discourse of taste as being driven by personal and regional competition, the need to cross boundaries, and the productive tension between individuality and group identity. And she anchors this argument in readings of some of the period's most canonical texts, including Dream of the Red Chamber and the Plum Blossom Fan. Li begins in chapter 1 with an exploration of the relationship between people and things, and in defining "things," she looks at the history of aesthetic theory in China and the changing vocabulary and attitudes toward objects. In chapter two, she looks at the question of value and the interrogation of the concepts of elegance and vulgarity that occurs at this time. The fascinating literati trickster Li Yu takes center stage--just as he would like--in chapter 3, where Li takes on the distinction between the real and the fake. And in chapter 4, Li turns to the terrain she traversed so successfully in Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge, the Ming-Qing transition and subsequent nostalgia for the deposed regime. Ultimately Li argues that claims of aesthetic existence and its material basis encode or resist social change, political crisis, and personal loss"--
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