Monstrosity and Chinese Cultural Identity: Xenophobia and the Reimagination of Foreignness in Vernacular Literature since the Song Dynasty by Isaac Yue (review)

Abstract

Despite being an inextricable component of what was the traditional Chinese manner of customarily dealing with foreigners, perhaps because of its wholly primeval as well as unseemly nature, from a scholarly perspective, monstrosity has heretofore been only sporadically and discontinuously discussed. Isaac Yue, however, via his Monstrosity and Chinese Cultural Identity: Xenophobia and the Reimagination of Foreignness in Vernacular Literature since the Song Dynasty, warrants our attention by having irrevocably and irreversibly changed this situation. He has elected to focus on this long recognized but uncommonly addressed subject by analyzing its articulation and expression in the early modern vernacular literary tradition from the Song dynasty (–) onward. Yue contends that monstrosity, as a trope within some of China’s most celebrated vernacular novels, hardly arose randomly but was a response to the prevailing social milieu of Song and subsequent imperial times, which was one that evinced both an increasing unease about foreigners and an undisguised contemptuousness toward them. Following his explanatory and agenda-setting “Introduction: China and the Foreign,” which deftly and straightforwardly sets the operative parameters for the discourse to come, Yue’s inquiry into monstrosity, apart from its conclusion, consists of five chapters. Not enough can be said about the crucialness of chapter , “China Turning Inward,” which Isaac Yue acknowledges as having received its title from the landmark book of the same name by the late historian James T. C. Liu (–). Just as Liu did in that work, Yue in this contextualizing initial chapter argues that there was a perceptible self-isolating that was concertedly manifested by what were otherwise innovative sociopolitical, Reviews 