Description
Book SynopsisFeeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China highlights the central role played by the body in writers' memories during the MingQing cataclysm. Sight, sound, taste, and touch configured ordinary experiences next to traumatic events. This embodied experience reveals literature's mission of remembrance as a moral endeavor in cultural continuity.
Trade ReviewCarefully structured, consistently argued, and elegantly written,
Feeling the Past certainly piques [the] reader’s interest in and advances our understanding of the traumatic Ming–Qing dynastic transition as well as the literati’s lived experiences and memory of the trying times. -- Jun Fang * Canadian Journal of History *
A powerful account that effectively prompts us to relive the pain and suffering of those embroiled in the bloody and chaotic dynastic transition occurring five hundred years earlier…If drawing attention to bodily sensations—experienced as well as remembered—is her goal, then Ling has surely achieved it quite successfully. -- Q. Edward Wang * Chinese Historical Studies *
The strength of Ling’s book is surely in its fine translations and detailed exploration of the trauma literature of the second half of the seventeenth century in China, forming a worthy successor to the work of Lynn Struve that first introduced the works of Ding Yaokang and Wang Xiuchu to nonspecialists on the era. -- David Luesink * China Review International *
