Xixiang ji Editions, the Bookmarket, and the Discourse on Obscenity: Wang Jide (d. 1623), Jin Shengtan (1608–61), and the Creation of Uncommon Readers

Abstract

In 1921, Guo Moruo (1892–1978), the writer, translator, and critic, was asked to write a preface for a newly edited, vernacular version of the Xixiang ji (The story of the Western wing) issued by a Shanghai publisher. Arguably, given the increasingly competitive world of the Shanghai bookmarket after 1912, the publisher’s request for the introductory remarks from one of the leading proponents of May Fourth iconoclasm might well have been designed as a clever sales ploy for that particular edition.¹ Interestingly, however, despite Guo’s reputation as a firebrand, his observations about the Xixiang ji are colored by considerable ambivalence about its representation of eroticism. Unlike other early Chinese song-dramas, the Xixiang ji portrayed love not simply as a sublime state of mind, but as an erotic passion between two unmarried youngsters, a fact that both exhilarated and troubled Guo.