The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity (review)

Although most major modern Chinese authors wrote essays, and essays have played a central role in cultural debates and the development of modern written Chinese, scholarship on the genre has been decidedly limited. Moreover, the sheer volume, complex historical contexts, and distinctive sensibilities pose formidable obstacles to analyzing this corpus. Charles Laughlin's rich cultural history, which focuses on informal essays from 1922 to the outbreak of war in 1937, makes a major contribution toward overcoming these obstacles and organizing the study of this enormous corpus.

Laughlin frames his discussion in terms of these essays' continuation of the rich legacy from premodern and early modern times of a "literature of leisure" (xianqing wenxue 閑情文學). He applies this broad label to works that, departing from Confucian concerns with public duty and moral cultivation, present alternative values based more on the appreciation of nature, beauty, and feeling (qing). This tradition includes Zhuangzi's playful parables, the Shishuo xinyu 世說 新語 (New accounts of tales of the world), the eremitic tradition in poetry, fictional works of the genre of jottings (biji 筆記), personal correspondence, autobiographies, travelogues, and literati novels such as Li Ruzhen's 李汝珍 Jinghua yuan 鏡花緣 (Flowers in the mirror; 1820).

In presenting leisure literature's legacy, Laughlin correctly accentuates the importance of the late Ming period. As economic development engendered unprecedented growth in leisure pursuits, and as a large number of literati became estranged from the official sphere during the Ming-Qing transition, writers began crafting the literature of leisure more self-consciously. To put it another way, what had been an incidental literature of leisure became an explicit literature for leisure. Taking Li Yu's 李漁 Xianqing ouji 閑情偶記. (Sketches of idle pleasures; 1671) as an archetype, Laughlin highlights the "little prose pieces" (xiaopin wen 小品文) of the Ming dynasty, a subgenre that Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885-1967) called "the apex of literary development." Appreciating the Gong'an 公安 and Jingling 竟陵 schools for promoting anticlassicism, individual personality, vitality, colloquial idiom, and direct perception unmediated by philosophical judgment, Zhou and other moderns saw the xiaopin wen as reaching unprecedented heights in expressing the pleasures of beholding natural scenery, collecting books and antiquities, and sharing tea and wine.

In the face of pressure to create realist narratives in the service of Western-style modernization, social reform, and revolution, many politically minded writers viewed essays in this leisure tradition as traditionalist or even reactionary. Yet Laughlin's central thesis is that Republican-era writers turned to the late imperial tradition of essay writing as "a compellingly 'Chinese' (or at least non-Western) way of being modern" (p. 17). Whereas politically engaged literature promoted progress and revolution, informal essay writing focused on domestic environments and "the art of living" in order to cultivate not only pleasure but also a rich emotional life intimately linked to an appreciation of nature, beauty, and humor.

Although Laughlin underscores the implicit critique in these works of the dominant May Fourth vision of modernity, he rejects the dichotomy between leisure literature and revolutionary literature as overly rigid. For him, these sensibilities express interdependent impulses, which are connected by leisure literature's "moral commitment to principles" and occasions of "leisurely lyricism within revolutionary discourse" (p. 14). Through this framework he strives to correct studies that characterize popular genres as escapist "literature of comfort" (as does Perry Link) and view incidental and personal writings as largely "alien" to revolutionary social movements (as does C. T. Hsia). For Laughlin, ambivalence toward technological and economic progress made leisure literature more akin to European modernism.

Laughlin shows that leisure literature became meaningful as a category only after Republican-era editors anthologized and explicitly theorized traditional prose. To substantiate his argument that modern xiaopin authors were continuing late Ming trends, he closely reads the prefaces and contents of important 1930s anthologies and journals devoted to the genre. If Ming xiaopin essays promoted reclusion, emotional expression, and unfettered "native sensibility" (xingling 性靈), editors of the 1930s, such as Zhou Zuoren, Shi Zhecun 施蛰存, and Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895-1976...