Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

Literature” (1977) and the pioneering volume which took inspiration from it (Hegel and Hessney, Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature) have offered a kaleidoscopic contribution to the topic.¹⁴ Extremely useful for conceptual discussion and concrete cases is the seminal volume, Studies in Confucian and Taoist Values, edited by Donald Munro, which delved between the two complementary polarities of “individualism” and “holism,” “moral” and “natural.”¹⁵ Other authors, like Andrew Plaks, have reconstructed representations of the self and its autonomy in Jin Ping Mei and Honglou Meng.¹⁶ Another remarkable project is the one managed by Dorothy Ko, who has not only discovered the creative space of women in their private history—including material and intellectual history with a focus on imagery and mentality—but also created a series of sophisticated tools for an enquiry into their world. In her essays, she elaborated on those key elements of gender identity which can be explored through the history of the body and fashion and the narratives of women’s self­assertion.¹⁷ As for the inner differentiation in the perception of the self, Martin Huang has probed into the literati’s crisis of self-image in Qing literature from a variety of perspectives (diachronic, geographical, gender, and social).¹⁸ Analyses of historical and literary sources from analogous perspectives can be found in other significant works such as Grace Fong’s studies on women’s self-representation in late imperial Chinese autobiographies and poetical writings¹⁹ and Sing-chen Lydia Chiang’s interpretation of the three Qing main collections of strange and extraordinary tales (Liaozhai Zhiyi 聊齋誌異, Zibuyu 子不語, and Yuewei Caotang Biji 閱微草堂筆記). The zhiguai genre particularly fit to construct and deconstruct literary identities, but the fact that these stories encompass the multiple contradictions and elusiveness of the self makes them also well-suited to unearthing the marginality, multiplicity, and mutability of the self in non-literary contexts and society in general. More accurately, this kind of fiction attests to the impossibility of a single, coherent, and knowable self, and exposes the covert world of subjective, irrational, and repressed feelings which challenge orthodoxy as well as conventional gender and social roles.²⁰ Further contributions for a better