|
"The Ming-Qing dynastic transition in the mid-seventeenth century occurred after nearly a century of rapid commodification of culture, when developments in print production transformed the function and reach of media. Recent scholarship on the early Qing has focused on the political connotations of the intellectual response to the transition, finding introspection, nostalgia, and the abandonment of the kind of radical inquiries pursued during the late Ming. Mixing Media in Early Modern China shifts our focus to the fields of economics and commercial publishing, and to the technological dynamics of early Qing culture. Through an analysis of the media-centered domain of commercial enterprise that flourished outside the elite culture, the book shows how some of the most influential cultural experimentation of this period harnessed these massive disruptions, using them to reveal the deep interweaving of the linguistic and material domains. The dynastic transition had a kind of leveling effect on the field of cultural production and consumption, creating opportunities for a new kind of cultural producer. SE Kile analyzes the corpus of one influential literatus, Li Yu (1611-1680), in three interrelated fields of material practice: text, the built environment, and the human body. Even as Li Yu reveals the artifice of existing cultural practices, he also shows how textual techniques can transform them. Through his unusual ability to renovate existing media forms, Li Yu was able to infiltrate the everyday life of his readers, mediating the relationships between people and the things around them, and becoming, in the process, the "master medium" of his day. Kile argues that this approach to cultural production, operating across multiple media forms, reveals the inherent technicity of all cultural practices. The shifts of Li Yu's lifetime gave him the chance to look at his own life, and the world around him, anew; his experiments at the intersection of media forms, in turn, are best understood as technological interventions that sought to mediate the lived experiences of his readers in new ways"--
|
