The Promise and Peril of Things: Literature and Material Culture in Late Imperial China By Wai-yee Li. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 362 pp. $140 (cloth), $35.00 (paper), $34.99 (eBook).

Abstract

Wai-yee Li ’ s study looks closely at the tensions around the ownership, accumulation, and transmission of valuable things in the late Ming and early Qing, with a particular focus on objects highly esteemed by, or with deep personal and shared meaning for, male literati. It combines close readings of texts in multiple genres — fiction, drama, poetry, and occasional prose — with discussion of the wider sociocultural setting within which real objects changed hands and human lives were shaped by the trajectories of the things in question.