Exploring the Matter and Minds of Late Ming Dynasty Readers

To hold a copy of an illustrated edition of a late Ming dynasty novel can be a moving experience for the aesthetically-sensitive reader. For one already thoroughly familiar with traditional Chinese culture, the almost weightless fascicle of such a volume might bring to mind marvelous thoughts on Chinese culture and fiction, while for one who knows little about things Chinese, it might raise a multitude of questions about the culture and literature that produced it. Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China by Robert E. Hegel is a first-rate, groundbreaking study that thoroughly answers the questions anyone holding a fascicle of illustrated Chinese fiction might have. One of C. T. Hsia’s distinguished students, Robert Hegel, whose Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation is entitled Sui T’ang Yen-i: The Sources and Narrative Techniques of a Traditional Chinese Novel, has been teaching at Washington University at St. Louis since 1975. His earlier books are The Novel in Seventeenth Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) and Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature, edited with Richard C. Hessney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). In The Novel in Seventeenth Century China, besides presenting the historical and cultural background for China as it moved from the Ming dynasty, which ended in 1644, to the Qing, Hegel gives his readings of six novels published at that timel This impressive study of Chinese fiction in a particular period prepared Hegel well for the book now under review and attests to a life spent in the reading and study of traditional Chinese fiction. Hegel’s deep understanding of all aspects of this field is further evidenced in his comprehensive article Traditional Chinese Fiction-The State of the Field. 2 The years of preparation that must have been put into the writing of this book is seen in Hegel’s reference to the hundreds of original editions of Ming and Qing fiction he examined.