'The Fragrant and Bedazzling' 香豔: The Poetics of Sensuality in Late Imperial and Modern China

This talk focuses on two unprecedented surges in poetry on the subject of “xiangyan” 香豔 (fragrant and bedazzling) and related themes, each at the turn of century, the 17th century from the late Ming to the early Qing and the 19th century from the late Qing to early Republican China.

In Chinese literary history, the high tides of the literati’s cultural construction of images of women tended to be associated with the ending of an era. This talk focuses on two unprecedented surges in poetry on the subject of “xiangyan” 香豔 (fragrant and bedazzling) and related themes, each at the turn of century, the 17th century from the late Ming to the early Qing and the 19th century from the late Qing to early Republican China.  “Fragrant and bedazzling” refers to the sensual qualities of beautiful women, the fundament of the sensual and erotic in classical Chinese poetry. By linking the two fin-de-siècle outpourings of “fragrant and bedazzling” poetry, I will demonstrate that this poetics of sensuality is generated by larger intellectual and cultural movements of late imperial and modern China. I argue that while the late Ming and early Qing literati developed a new poetics of sensuality as a countercultural movement against orthodox Neo-Confucianism, the similarly inclined intelligentsia of the late Qing and republican era revived this trend as a response to China’s modernization.

Xiaorong Li earned her PhD from McGill University in 2006 and is currently teaching late imperial Chinese literature as Associate Professor in the East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies Department at University of California, Santa Barbara.  Her areas of research are concerned with gender and literary production, women's writings, literati culture, and literary trends in the late imperial period (ca. 1500–1900). In addition to a number of articles, she published a book titled Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China: Transforming the Inner Chambers with University of Washington Press in 2012.