A discharged official in mid-Ming China faced significant changes in his life. This book explores three such officials in the sixteenth century - Wang Jiusi, Kang Hai, and Li Kaixian - who turned to literary endeavors when forced to retire. Instead of the formal writing expected of scholar-officials, however, they chose to engage in the stigmatized genre of qu (songs), a collective term for drama and sanqu. As their efforts reveal, a disappointing end to an official career and a physical move away from the center led to their embrace of qu and the pursuit of a marginalized literary genre....
A discharged official in mid-Ming China faced significant changes in his life. This book explores three such officials in the sixteenth century - Wang...