The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West by Ning Ma (review)

This remarkable work opens up new avenues of research in the history of the novel across continents. Ning Ma's comparative approach starts with the historical argument that Europe and Asia share "horizontal continuities" in the early modern period. Drawing on the influential essay by Joseph Fletcher, Ma lays out comparative literary method that is grounded in lateral economic relations between different regions of the world. Ma then applies comparative historical method to literary developments, specifically the emergence of the novel in both Europe and East Asia. This combination of transnational and "planetary" approaches allows Ma to establish multiple perspectives so as to elude the nationalist presumptions that continue to define so many histories of the novel. From the general question of historical method, Ma moves into a discussion about shared connections between disparate literary communities. The claim that literature moved between cultures is perhaps easier to posit than that of other more concrete historical fields. However, Ma pushes her argument beyond an idealized even-handedness of world literary relations to argue that a concrete economic relationship linked Asia, Europe, and the Americas: namely, the international circulation of silver from Spanish-run mines in the Andes across the Atlantic to fund the Catholic campaigns against Protestantism and over the Pacific to trade for Chinese luxuries. In conjunction with the macro-economic history of silver extraction and exchange, Ma develops a transcultural concept of the realist novels that depicts individualized biographies within an increasingly commercialized society. Her chapters provide close readings of four novels: Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605, 1615), Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), The Plum in the Golden Vase (late sixteenth century), and Ihara Saikaku's Life of an Amorous Man (1682). Ma posits parallel formations of realist novels in which individualized characters, as opposed to epic figures, confront the new material forces transforming their respective societies. One common feature in all four novels is the representation of newly formed civil associations, or nascent public spheres that operate independently from the state. Ma carefully chose well-known critical terms in defining her concept of realism across cultures. Lukacs's "transcendental homelessness" and Bakhtin's "heteroglossia" are among the tools she deploys in outlining her transcultural concept of realism. While the theoretical chapters remain tightly focused on a series of such key terms, Ma's style of argument expands as she provides close readings of each novel. The epilogue introduces another, very fruitful area of comparative literary analysis—the European reception of late Mingearly Qing "scholar-beauty" novels. In this last section, a Goethe scholar interested in world literature would find good company as Ma aligns her model of the novel's parallel emergence in Asia and Europe with the poet's reading of the first eighteenth-century translations of Chinese romances.

In her individualized interpretations of her four novels, Ma moves away from theory-driven jargon to concentrate on individual moments that help define her concept of a transcultural realism. Not obliged to examine the novels as a whole, she concentrates on scenes and details that point to a global complex of material relations. This realism is often expressed in terms of the characters' concentration on money and sexual pleasure, along with its disruption of tradition philosophies, whether Confucian or Catholic royalist. Yet those critics deeply familiar with the specific novels might wonder whether Ma's attention to details, specifically those alluding to financial transactions in China, could result in an interpretation of many small anecdotes that do not address the work of art in its overall relation to economic history. Ma's attention to the silver trade raises old-fashioned Marxist questions of mediation concerning the interdependence between the novel and the economy. She provides an exhaustive commentary to contextualize the few passages in Don Quixote that refer to the China trade, yet a reader may be left asking how far these...