Alexander Des Forges, "Testing the Literary: Prose and the Aesthetic in Early Modern China" (Harvard UP, 2021)
New Books in East Asian Studies
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Essay Writing - The Trope of Representative Speech
The trope of representative speech is often considered to be a defining feature of the modern prose essay. But in fact, we find many essays that make use of this approach, but also many essays that do not. And I think this has some very interesting kind of political ramifications because it heightens the stakes of the essay writing. It says, this is the place where we are going to have struggles about what the sages were actually saying. That turn has a tremendous effect on the definition of literary as a class during this period.
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