Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Ding Yaokang & Ming-Qing Literature

Ding Yaokang & Ming-Qing Literature Dissertation Reviews has posted Casey Schoenberger’s review of Ling Xiaoqiao’s dissertation, Re-reading the Seventeenth Century: Ding Yaokang (1599-1669) and His Writings. Here’s how it begins:

Living through the final decades of the Ming Dynasty and the first decades of the Qing, Ding Yaokang 丁耀亢 experienced and participated in one of the most tumultuous yet artistically fruitful periods in China’s history. The Shandong scholar, teacher, essayist, poet, and playwright’s extant corpus further reveals a variety nearly unmatched among his contemporaries. Why, then, have so few scholars, especially in the West, engaged with Ding’s work to the same extent they have with that of his prolific southern predecessors and contemporaries Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574-1645) and Li Yu 李漁 (1610-1680)? Xiaoqiao Ling’s dissertation, “Re-reading the Seventeenth Century: Ding Yaokang (1599-1669) and his Writings” answers this and other questions as it explores major themes in seventeenth-century intellectual life from the variety of angles Ding’s complex corpus provides.