individualistic values with premodern Confucian and Daoist ethical thought.

16. Plaks, “Self-enclosure and Self-absorption in the Classic Chinese Novel.”

17. Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters.

18. Martin Huang, Literati and Self-Re/presentation, and “Stylization and Invention.” On the ideological crisis of the “Confucian order,” as reflected also in the perception of the self, see Chow Kai-wing, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China. Martin Huang in his volume, by decoding the “mask” of fictional alter ego in novels, is inspired by another important work on self-representation, Wu Pei-yi’s The Confucian’s Progress, which is based on self-cultivation documents. See also Miller, Masks of Fiction in a Dream of the Red Chamber.

19. See, for instance, Grace Fong, “Writing Self and Writing Lives.” Fong’s paper “Sensations and Emotions in Everyday Life: Gendered Representations in Ming-Qing Poetry” was presented in Venice at the “Conference on Perception of Bodily Sensations and Emotions in South and East Asian Cultures” (June 27–28, 2004). Her article “A Feminine Condition? Women’s Poetry on Illness in Late Imperial China” aims to decipher the ways in which women have “textualized” their bodies.

20. Sing-chen Lydia Chiang, Collecting the Self: Body and Identity.

21. Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self; Cahill, The Compelling Image. For the iconographic conventions of Chinese portraiture, see Stuart and Rawski, Worshiping the Ancestors.

22. Wu Hung, “Beyond Stereotypes.”

23. In the Confucian system, the “moral self” is a basic category of representation of self and others. On the emergence of “filial piety” from an inventory with Chinese indigenous personality factors in the present, see Zhang and Bond, “Personality and Filial Piety among College Students in two Chinese Societies.” On the peculiarity of Chinese mentality, see Bond, “Localizing the Imperial Outreach”; and Yang and Bond, “Exploring Implicit Personality Theories.”

24. The term “self-motivation” is used differently from its current meaning given in psychological and moral studies. Here self-motivation is neither in opposition to altruism, nor the branch of studies and practical methods to achieve personal fulfillment; it is the acknowledgement of the innate tendency of promoting oneself and satisfying ambitions and desires.

25. Various scholars have stressed that Confucianism favored the maintaining of hierarchical order, roles, and the bonds of social relationships rather than promoting distinctive individuals with divergent conceptions