Sound and Sight: Poetry and Courtier Culture in the Yongming Era (483-493)

This is the first book to examine Chinese poetry and courtier culture using the concept of shengse—sound and sight—which connotes "sensual pleasure." Under the moral and political imperative to avoid or even eliminate representations of sense perception, premodern Chinese commentators treated overt displays of artistry with great suspicion, and their influence is still alive in modern and contemporary constructions of literary and cultural history.

The Yongming poets, who openly extolled "s...