Toward an Extraordinary Everyday: Li Yu's (1611-1680) Vision, Writing, and Practice
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation considers how the literatus entrepreneur Li Yu (1610-1680) took advantage of the burgeoning market economy of early Qing China to engineer and market a new experience of the everyday. The world in which Li Yu's cultural products were best sellers was rife with novelty. The Ming dynasty had collapsed in 1644, yet many of its defining features remained: urban centers brimmed with gadgets, both Chinese and foreign, that offered new possibilities for engaging the material world. The status of writing and the reading public was also changing, as more books were published at lower costs than ever before. Li Yu capitalized on this ripe moment to develop and sell cultural products that directed the focus of consumers to the details and possibilities of their everyday. I argue that through his cultural production, Li Yu changed what constituted cultural capital and who had rights to it in the urban centers of southern China in the early Qing. Li Yu made a brand of his name, which he used to market his fiction and drama as well as intangible products like innovative designs and do-it-yourself technologies. I examine the strategies that traverse the range of his cultural production to demonstrate how he altered the physical makeup of the built environment and the visual experience of theatrical performance, while also revising the ways that they could be represented in language and depicted in narrative. Readers of Li Yu's writing, visitors to his gardens, and audiences for his theatrical productions could expect to encounter particulars: his language zooms in on the material world, narrating the gritty specifics of genitals and dirt; he waxes technical about his rigged stage lighting and dioramic windows. In one of his stories, a man uses a telescope to impersonate a god; in another a wily thief cannot "see" a woman's myopia, and so misjudges her. At the heart of this study is Li Yu's magnum opus, Leisure Notes (Xianqing ouji), a curious collection of severa…
abstract: This dissertation considers how the literatus entrepreneur Li Yu (1610-1680) took advantage of the burgeoning market economy of early Qing China to engineer and market a new experience of the everyday. The world in which Li Yu's cultural products were best sellers was rife with novelty. The Ming dynasty had collapsed in 1644, yet many of its defining features remained: urban centers brimmed with gadgets, both Chinese and foreign, that offered new possibilities for engaging the material world. The status of writing and the reading public was also changing, as more books were published at lower costs than ever before. Li Yu capitalized on this ripe moment to develop and sell cultural products that directed the focus of consumers to the details and possibilities of their everyday. I argue that through his cultural production, Li Yu changed what constituted cultural capital and who had rights to it in the urban centers of southern China in the early Qing. Li Yu made a brand of his name, which he used to market his fiction and drama as well as intangible products like innovative designs and do-it-yourself technologies. I examine the strategies that traverse the range of his cultural production to demonstrate how he altered the physical makeup of the built environment and the visual experience of theatrical performance, while also revising the ways that they could be represented in language and depicted in narrative. Readers of Li Yu's writing, visitors to his gardens, and audiences for his theatrical productions could expect to encounter particulars: his language zooms in on the material world, narrating the gritty specifics of genitals and dirt; he waxes technical about his rigged stage lighting and dioramic windows. In one of his stories, a man uses a telescope to impersonate a god; in another a wily thief cannot "see" a woman's myopia, and so misjudges her. At the heart of this study is Li Yu's magnum opus, Leisure Notes (Xianqing ouji), a curious collection of severa…
author: Kile, Sarah
language: English
keywords: Chinese literature, Material culture, Material culture in literature, Li, Yu, 1611-1680?
date published: 2013
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:44:27Z
provider: Columbia University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Columbia University

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7916/D8Z325W7