In this new study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin W. Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire. He further suggests that the rise of vernacular fiction during the late Ming dynasty should be studied in the context of contemporary debates on desire, along with the new and complex views that emerged from those debates. Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late China shows that the obsession of authors with individual desire is an essential quality that defines...

This study of the Chinese novel in the eighteenth century, arguably one of the greatest periods of the genre, focuses on the autobiographical features of three important works: The Dream of the Red Chamber, or The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng), The Scholars (Rulin waishi), and the relatively neglected The Humble Words of an Old Rustic (Yesou puyan). The author seeks for answers to the question of why the Chinese novel was becoming increasingly autobiographical during the eighteenth century, even as explicitly autobiographical writing was in a decline. He suggests that several new trends...