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The Many Faces of Ruan Dacheng: Poet, Playwright, Politician in Seventeenth-Century China is the first monograph in English on a controversial Ming dynasty literary figure. It examines and reassesses the life and work of Ruan Dacheng (1587–1646), a poet, dramatist, and politician in the late Ming period. Ruan Dacheng was in his own time a highly regarded poet, but is best known as a dramatist, and his poetry is now largely unknown. He is most notorious as a ‘treacherous official’ of the Ming–Qing transition, and as a result his literary work—his plays as well as his poetry—has been neglected and undervalued. Hardie argues that Ruan’s literary work is of much greater significance in the history of Chinese literature than has generally been recognised since his own time. Ruan, rather than being a transgressive figure, is actually a very typical late Ming literatus, and as such his attitudes towards identity and authenticity can add to our understanding of these issues in late Ming intellectual history. These insights will impact on the cultural and intellectual history of late imperial China.
Price: £76.00
Pages: 320
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Imprint: Hong Kong University Press
Publication Date:
11 March 2022
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9789888754076
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
‘This work is exciting and reads almost like a novel. It has both a biographical and a literary component. It successively examines Ruan Dacheng’s biography in the context of his time, his complex relationships with his contemporaries, and the question of the judgment made on him in his time and by posterity.’
—Rainier Lanselle, École Pratique des Hautes Études, France
—Rainier Lanselle, École Pratique des Hautes Études, France