The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China

""Fragrant and bedazzling" (xiangyan) is a Chinese phrase synonymous with sensual and bewitching feminine beauty and, in literature, eroticism. Sensual literature, even to many scholars today, is morally suspect. Situated in China's recent past from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century, this study has brought to light a literary tradition and underscored intellectual trends that have been neglected, marginalized, misunderstood, and even condemned. This book will be of value to scholars of literary and intellectual movements in late imperial and modern China, sexuality, gender, literary decadence, modernism, countercultures, and erotic literature"--