Wai-yee Li is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. Her recent books include Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge (Columbia, 2020), Keywords in Chinese Culture (2020), and Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (2014).

• AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction1. People and Things2. Elegance and Vulgarity3. The Real and the Fake4. Lost and FoundEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex

This wide-ranging exploration of human-object interactions provides a heightened appreciation of the complexity and variety of these relations and of the aptness of a material culture lens for approaching the literary culture of the Ming-Qing transition.

Wai-yee Li is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. Her recent books include Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge (Columbia, 2020), Keywords in Chinese Culture (2020), and Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (2014).

• AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction1. People and Things2. Elegance and Vulgarity3. The Real and the Fake4. Lost and FoundEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex

This wide-ranging exploration of human-object interactions provides a heightened appreciation of the complexity and variety of these relations and of the aptness of a material culture lens for approaching the literary culture of the Ming-Qing transition.

Wai-yee Li is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. Her recent books include Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge (Columbia, 2020), Keywords in Chinese Culture (2020), and Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (2014).

• AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction1. People and Things2. Elegance and Vulgarity3. The Real and the Fake4. Lost and FoundEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex

This wide-ranging exploration of human-object interactions provides a heightened appreciation of the complexity and variety of these relations and of the aptness of a material culture lens for approaching the literary culture of the Ming-Qing transition.