Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

by Tina Lu

2008 Ranis Prize, Yale University

Product discription

Described as “all under Heaven,” the Chinese empire might have extended infinitely, covering all worlds and cultures. That ideology might have been convenient for the state, but what did late imperial people really think about the scope and limits of the human community? Writers of late imperial fiction and drama were, the author argues, deeply engaged with questions about the nature of the Chinese empire and of the human community. Fiction and drama repeatedly pose questions concerning relations both among people and between people and their possessions: What ties individuals together, whether permanently or temporarily? When can ownership be transferred, and when does an object define its owner? What transforms individual families or couples into a society? Tina Lu traces how these political questions were addressed in fiction through extreme situations: husbands and wives torn apart in periods of political upheaval, families so disrupted that incestuous encounters become inevitable, times so desperate that people have to sell themselves to be eaten.

Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center (January 31, 2009)

Note:

Although a number of scholars have studied the structure of ideas that buttressed the creation of empires in early modern Europe, historians of China have tended to assume (or even to argue) that such complex of ideas was unnecessary fo the Chinese state.

When territoiral expansion was debated, as at the Kangxi court in the case of Taiwan, the focus was not theoretical -- whether there was a point beyond which the empire should not expand -- but instead purely expedient.

No minister wondered whether the empire was exceeding its rights. Public debates like those thar took place in Spain in 1551 between Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolome de las Casas regarding moral justifiability of the conquest would have been unimaginable. Just as the Qing dynasts claimed, the borders to a state governed by benevolent bahavior might not exist at all, as the traditional appellation wuwai(無外) indicates. States defined by a shared language or a shared history have built-in limits. But the empire was different. Why should the wholre world not fall under a single Confucain rule? (pp. 6-7)