The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China: The "Fragrant and Bedazzling" Movement (1600–1930) by Xiaorong Li (review)

Li Xiaorong's newest book, The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China, in many ways complements and enriches the literary and gender dimensions engaged in her equally luminous 2012 monograph, Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China: Transforming the Inner Chambers. In her earlier work, Li focused on the trope of guige 閨閣 (inner chambers) as the pivot of her analysis of Ming-Qing women's poetry, probing its gendered implications as a physical, social, and literary space. The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China, on the other hand, deals with literati poetry and other literary sources produced between the late Ming and the early Republican era and thus transports its readers to the wai 外 (literary), outer, male-gendered realm, an equally genred sphere in which male poets and authors relied on xiangyan 香艷 (fragrant and bedazzling) as a cornerstone for their aesthetic and political movements. As is the case for Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China, there is much to learn from Poetics and Politics of Sensuality, a groundbreaking, impressively researched, and highly original work that complicates and completes the knowledge that students and scholars of Chinese studies need to gain about literature, culture, poetry, and intellectual history in the early and the modern periods.

Li explicitly states that her study's main objective is not to provide a "genealogy of literature related to the concept of xiangyan" (2)—though she does provide her audience with a brief but illuminating timeline of the concept before the late Ming era. Rather, she strives to isolate "the poetics and politics of sensuality from the prevalent Confucian exegetical tradition," in order to produce the "first history of how 'fragrant and bedazzling' became a guiding aesthetic of countercultural movements from the late Ming to the early Republican era" (10). Thus, theoretically, this book purports to present a revisionist genealogy of a specific set of sources that have been either misread or forgotten, by engaging both the erotic and the political import of these writers' output during roughly three hundred years. In so doing, Li succeeds first of all in bringing "sexy" back, as it were, to the works of the literati, whose xiangyan metaphors have been too often (mis)understood as conventional and trite expressions of loyalism and patriotism. Second, and just as significant, Poetics and Politics of Sensuality reconstructs how sensualist poets and other writers of these eras, in embracing and praising desire and love, were operating as cultural and political dissidents who first rejected orthodox neo-Confucianism and eventually also the radical cultural reform agenda of the late Qing and the New Culture movement of the republic. Her historiographical efforts rest on a dazzling array of archival resources, many of which are discussed for the first time, that include an impressive array of primary sources, from late Ming and Qing anthologies of sensual poetry and essays to modern magazines and newspapers. The author's extensive quotations from these little-known texts, along with her superb translations, will prove enlightening and useful to many and will go a long way toward supporting and strengthening the rationale for studying Li's perspective on this material.

Temporality plays a central place in Li's revisionist agenda, and she accordingly has organized Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in two chronological parts that in her view mark the emergence and the return of xiangyan as a countercultural force. The first part focuses on the Ming, and the second on heterogeneous materials composed at of the turn of the twentieth century, with a short but incisive and thought-provoking coda on the legacy of xiangyan on May Fourth Period's authors. Li's chronological teleology may not initially strike late imperial studies specialists as necessarily innovative, as it works within conventional historical frameworks. It is important to underline, however, how her choice of privileging poetry in general, and shi 詩 poetry in particular, as...