Yinghui Wu

I am a scholar of early modern Chinese literature (the Ming and Qing periods) with research interests in drama, fiction, popular culture, performance, and media history. My current work seeks to bring the study of Chinese drama and performance cultures into dialogue with the emergent field of early modern media studies. This exploration originated with my observation that the common paradigms for studying drama today, which treat plays as either literary texts or theatrical performances, or as a combination of both, are inadequate to account for the distinctly fluid and heterogenous cultures of drama in early modern China. A thorough understanding of these cultures requires us to address the interface between plays and media in diverse communicative contexts. In my projects of rethinking the relationship between plays and media, I engage with new critical concepts and interdisciplinary research such as “media archaeology,” which explores the media forms and practices that predate the electronic and digital media while being critical of teleological and technocentric views on media history, and “media ecology,” which considers the pluralities and interconnectedness of media as well as their interplays with humans, technologies, cultures, and economic and social processes. My conceptualization of media is built on the resonances between pre-modern Chinese ideas of mediation with the expansive notion of media put forward by McLuhan and others in contemporary scholarship. Media in this sense encompass the semiotic (language, writing, image, sound, etc.), the technical and material (manuscript, print, paper, building, etc.), and the cultural (music, dance, drama, painting, religion, etc.).

My first monograph, Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies (forthcoming 2025), develops a synthetic approach to spell out the links between the polyvalent cultural experimentations with plays and the affordances of media studies. Through delving into various practices of “playing with plays,” the book challenges conventional literary and theater history and argues for a new paradigm to study early modern Chinese plays as expanding and changing processes of cultural innovation that hinge on the refashioning and multiplying of media.

Please check my website for the most current information on my research, teaching, and projects: https://sites.google.com/view/yinghuiwu/home

My publications in T’oung Pao and East Asian Publishing and Society explores the mixed-register, cross-generic, mixed-media practices in the productive reading and use of drama. My recent research interest is oriented toward looking beyond the materiality and paratextuality of plays to reconstruct the media events that took place surrounding drama on the cultural arena of early modern China. In a forthcoming book chapter, I propose a rethinking of the relationship of the elegant (ya) and the common (su) through the “hypermedial” illustration in The Story of the Western Wing with Vermilion-Ink Annotations (Zhuding Xixiang ji). 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 several new projects, including a study of “environments as media” via Pan Zhiheng’s (1556-1622) writings on performance, the broken bonds between performers and patrons in seventeenth-century China, and the information ecology of early modern China manifested through the circulation of “worldly verses” across vernacular short stories, dramas, and daily-use encyclopedias.