Cultural Mobility and Chinese Literary "Early Modernity": Trade, Printing, and Travel in Ming-Qing Vernacular Fictions

This essay focuses on representations of trade, printing, and travel in vernacular fictions from Ming- Qing China as signs of cultural mobility and of Chinese literary early modernity. It argues that Ming- Qing vernacular fictions express modes of symbolic improvisation and negotiation in response to a larger process of cultural destabilization that occurred alongside material developments in trade, printing, and travel. More specifically, as acts of cultural negotiation, Ming- Qing vernacular fictions reinvented the "unity of three teachings" (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism) in "satiric," "didactic," and "lyrical" manners, and this reinvention worked to undermine the hierarchical elements in these philosophical and religious discourses while developing those components that were supportive of a more individualized vision of the meaning of human existence. By attending to these literary- historical intersections, this essay hopes to formulate a definition of Chinese literary early modernity that bears broader comparative and interdisciplinary implications.