Towers in the Void: Li Yu and Early Modern Chinese Media

Li Yu, a maverick cultural entrepreneur, survived the Ming-Qing dynastic transition by engaging a broad range of cultural forms and translating his expertise into woodblock-printed form. S. E. Kile's Towers in the Void explores Li Yu's creative enterprise, highlighting the materiality of media forms and the interconnection between language, the tangible world, and literature, garden design, and body modification. It argues that books, bodies, and buildings should be seen as interlinked media forms, and the Ming and Qing dynasties as a crucial site of global early modern cultural change.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 392 pages
Publication date: 30 May 2023
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Li Yu, a maverick cultural entrepreneur, navigated the tumultuous Ming-Qing dynastic transition of the mid-seventeenth century through a commercially successful practice rooted in intermedial experimentation. He embraced an astonishing array of cultural forms, ranging from theatrical performances and literary productions to fashion, wellness, garden and interior design, and the composition of letters and administrative documents. By drawing on his nonliterary work, Li Yu reshaped his writing, translating his diverse expertise into easily transmittable woodblock-printed forms.

Towers in the Void, a groundbreaking analysis of Li Yu's work, explores his creative enterprise as a reimagining of early modern media forms. S. E. Kile argues that Li Yu's cultural experimentation leverages the boundaries between language and the tangible world, highlighting the materiality of specific media forms while expanding the scope of early modern media through the interweaving of books, buildings, and bodies. Within and across these media, Li Yu's cultural entrepreneurship with the technology of the printed book embraced reproducibility while retaining a personal touch. His literary practice informed his garden design, and vice versa, as he drew on garden design to transform the vernacular short story.

Li Yu's fiction also ventured into ideas for extreme body modification, which reshaped the possibilities of real human bodies in his nonfiction writing. Towers in the Void urges a reevaluation of books, bodies, and buildings as interconnected media forms, both in early modern China and in today's media-saturated world. It positions the Ming and Qing dynasties as a crucial site of global early modern cultural change.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780231210058