Xiaoqiao Ling's main field of interest is late imperial Chinese literature with a focus on performance texts, vernacular fiction, and the print culture. She has published in both Chinese and English on fiction and drama commentary, legal imagination in literature, memory and trauma in 17th-century China. Her first book, Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019), explores traumatic memories and their transmission across generations during the Manchu conquest of China. She is currently working on a second book-length project on the romantic play The Story of the Western Wing. By tracing how various social groups across cultural and regional geographies interpreted, adapted, and appropriated the play, this project aims at investigating how the play's social life sustained its iconic status in early modern East Asian cultural sphere.
Her main field of interest is late imperial Chinese literature with a focus on performance texts and vernacular fiction. Her first book explores traumatic memories and their transmission across generations during the Manchu conquest of China in the seventeenth century. She is currently working on a second book-length project on the various reading communities (middle-brow and elite readers, Chosŏn Korean reader-writers) that coaleced around the iconic play The Western Wing, arguably the most popular reading matter throughout late imperial China.
Publications
Selected publications:
“History-Making and Remembrance in Taohua shan 桃花扇 (Peach Blossom Fan).” In Books, Structure of Knowledge, and Cultural Transmission 圖書、知識建構與文化傳播. Edited by Li Sher-shiueh李奭學 and Hu Hsiao-chen 胡曉真, pp. 257–312. Taipei: Hanxue yanjiu zhongxin, 2015.
「夷虜淫毒之慘」—借《西廂記》閱讀《海陵佚史》(Debauchery and Barbarity: Reading Retrieved History of Hailing against The Western Wing). Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Literature 清華中文學報, 12 (December 2014): 153–200.
Co-authored with Guo Yingde 郭英德. “Fresh Faces for Those Full of Emotions: Zhu Suchen’s Qinlou yue.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 1:1–2 (November 2014): 65–89.
“Home and Imagined Stage in Ding Yaokang’s Huaren you (Ramblings with Magicians): The Communal Reading of a Seventeenth-century Play.” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, 33.1 (July 2014): 1–36.
“Law, Deities, and Beyond: From the Sanyan Stories to Xingshi yinyuan zhuan.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 74.1 (June 2014): 1–42.
“Crafting a Book: The Sequel to The Plum in the Golden Vase.” East Asian Publishing and Society, 3 (2013): 115–152.
Research Activity
Ling,Xiaoqiao*. To Remember Re-member and Disremember: Instrumentality of Traditional Chinese Texts. CCKF(2/15/2015 - 7/15/2015).
