Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese NarrativeTo discuss the supernatural in China is “to talk of foxes and speak of ghosts.” Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter. Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. As the most ambiguous alien in the late imperial Chinese imagination, the fox reveals which boundaries around the human and the ordinary were most frequently violated and, therefore, most jealously guarded. Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time: the narrative boundaries of genre and texts; domesticity and the outside world; chaos and order; the human and the non-human; class; gender; sexual relations; and the progression from animal to monster to transcendent. As “middle creatures,” foxes were morally ambivalent, endowed with superhuman but not quite divine powers; like humans, they occupied a middle space between the infernal and the celestial. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
1 Species History Genre History | 7 |
Fox Practice and Theory | 34 |
3 Haunting and Residence | 87 |
4 Fox Worship | 127 |
5 Foxes and Sex | 171 |
6 The Fox Romance | 224 |
Foxes and Meaning | 290 |
Conclusion | 323 |
Reference Matter | 345 |
Title and Author Index | 363 |
| 369 | |
| 371 | |
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Common terms and phrases
alien anecdote animal beauty become biji chapter Chinese chuanqi classical tale collection concubine conghua contrast creatures cultural Daoist demon desire Discourse of Foxes discussion domestic erotic example exorcism exorcist fairies female Feng Menglong fox lodger fox romance fox stories fox tradition fox worship fox's Foxes and Ghosts Gan Bao genre guangji haunting Honglou meng household huli jing human form Huxian Ji Yun Ji's karmic late imperial late Ming Lianxiang Liaozhai zhiyi literary lore lover lust maids male fox medium Ming and Qing monsters moral narrative night Paracelsus parasitism poltergeist prostitutes Pu Songling Pu's Qing Qingfeng records relationship reveals role seduced seems sexual shigao Shuzhen species strange supernatural Taiping guangji Tang tion TPGJ transcendent transformation vernacular fiction vixen Wang woman xian xinyang Yingning young Youtai Yuan Mei Yuewei caotang Yun's YWCT Zhang Zhaoyang zhiguai Zhongguo zhuan