Böcker av Keith McMahon

In Saying All That Can Be Said, Keith McMahon presents the first full analysis of the sexually explicit portrayals in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase). McMahon places the novel in the historical context of premodern Chinese sexual culture and echoes its way of taking sex as a vehicle for reading the world.

This volume completes McMahon's acclaimed history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of empresses and imperial concubines as mere victims or playthings, this book considers them as full-fledged participants in palace life, whether as mothers, wives, or go-betweens in the emperor's relations with others.

Keith McMahon draws upon decades of research to describe polygamous emperors and women rulers throughout Chinese history. Displaying rare historical breadth, his lively and fascinating study will be invaluable as a comprehensive and authoritative resource for all readers interested in the domestic life of royal palaces.

Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, this title examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China.

For centuries of Chinese history, polygamy and prostitution were closely linked practices that legitimized the 'polygynous male'. This title introduces a fresh concept, 'passive polygamy', to explain the unusual number of Qing stories in which women take charge of a man's desires, turning him into an instrument of female will.