Yinghui Wu

A photo of Yinghui Wu
E-mail: yinghui@humnet.ucla.edu Office: Royce 264B

I am a scholar of early modern Chinese literature (the Ming and Qing periods) with research interests in drama, fiction, popular culture, and early modern media studies. My book manuscript, Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies, develops a synthetic approach to spell out the links between the polyvalent cultural experimentations with plays and the affordances of media studies. The book challenges the study of plays as literary texts and/or performances in conventional literary and theater history, and argues for a new paradigm to rethink early modern Chinese plays as expanding and changing processes of cultural innovation that involve the refashioning and multiplying of media. Through delving into various practices of “playing with plays,” it illuminates the dynamic interactions between plays and diverse media environments (print, visual, qu-singing, examination, and Buddhist performative media), and their implications for various cultural players negotiating their relationships with the early modern world.

My recent publications that appear in T’oung Pao and East Asian Publishing and Society center around questions of media mix and remediation in the productive reading and use of drama. I am also the co-editor of Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual (1600-1850): Between East and West, a volume of essays that explore the distinct representations of emotions and passions in conventionally understudied genres such as journals, memoirs, conduct manuals, and correspondences in early modern Asia and Europe. I am currently working on a new project that investigates the information ecology of early modern China through looking at the circulation of everyday values via “worldly verses” across vernacular short stories, dramas, and daily-use encyclopedias.

Education

Ph.D., Chinese & Comparative Literature, Washington University in St. Louis

M.A., English Language and Literature, Peking University

B.A., English, Renmin University of China

Publications

Edited Volume

Co-edited with Malina Stefanovska and Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge. Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850: Between East and West. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Book Chapters

Co-authored Malina Stefanovska. “Introduction.” In Malina Stefanovska, Yinghui Wu, Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge. eds., Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850: Between East and West. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 3-11.

“How to Manage Emotions in ‘The Classic of Whoring’.” In Malina Stefanovska, Yinghui Wu, Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge. eds., Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850: Between East and West. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 95-111.

Articles

“Poetic ‘Hypertext,’ Evocative ‘Figure in Landscape,’ and the Reading of Illustrated Plays in the Late Ming,” East Asian Publishing and Society (2024), forthcoming.

“Constructing a Playful Space: Eight-Legged Essays on Xixiang ji and Pipa ji,” T’oung Pao 102: 4-5 (2016), 503-545.

Book Reviews

 The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection, by Zhang Yingyu; translated by Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC) Resource Center (August 2018): http://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/yinghui-wu/

Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Yuming He (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 37 (2015), 208-211.