Alexander Des Forges

Early nineteenth-century China saw a heightened concern with the literariness of texts, from debates between well-known elite scholars over the proper social role of literary aesthetics to new efforts at the local level to collect "immoral" texts and burn them. This project will analyze the dynamics of interaction between theories of literature and practices dealing with written texts, and examine the relationship between literary style and political activism. Conventional assessments of pre-modern literary prose hold that its aesthetic qualities were understood as subordinate to the morality that it conveyed; that it was primarily didactic and instrumental in nature. My aim in this project is to rethink these assessments from a theoretically-informed and interdisciplinary perspective.