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The maverick cultural entrepreneur Li Yu survived the tumultuous Ming-Qing dynastic transition of the mid-seventeenth century through a commercially successful practice founded on intermedial experimentation. He engaged an astonishingly broad variety of cultural forms: from theatrical performance and literary production to fashion and wellness; from garden and interior design to the composition of letters and administrative documents. Drawing on his nonliterary work to reshape his writing, he translated this wide-ranging expertise into easily transmittable woodblock-printed form. Towers in the Void is a groundbreaking analysis of Li Yu's work across these varied fields. It uses the concept of media to traverse them, revealing Li Yu's creative enterprise as a remaking of early modern media forms.S. E. Kile argues that Li Yu's cultural experimentation exploits the seams between language and the tangible world. He draws attention to the materiality of particular media forms, expanding the scope of early modern media by interweaving books, buildings, and bodies. Within and across these media, Li Yu's cultural entrepreneurship with the technology of the printed book embraced its reproducibility while retaining a personal touch. His literary practice informed his garden design and, conversely, he drew on garden design to transform the vernacular short story. Ideas for extreme body modification in Li Yu's fiction remade the possibilities of real human bodies in his nonfiction writing. Towers in the Void calls for seeing books, bodies, and buildings as interlinked media forms, both in early modern China and in today's media-saturated world, positioning the Ming and Qing as a crucial site of global early modern cultural change "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"--
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