319 Book Reviews Nan Nü 20 (2018) 319-324 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/15685268-00202P09 Nan Nü 20 (2018) 319-324 Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun, eds. Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017. xii + 213 pp. US $ 121/ Eur 105. ISBN 9789004339156. This collection has some of the trappings of a conference volume. An intro- duction sets the stage, and seven additional essays tackle various issues con- nected with the so-called “wanton woman,” often translated as yinfu 淫婦, a category it seeks to define, contextualize, apply, or in some cases resist. How- ever, it is not a conference volume in the normal sense. It builds on a panel presentation at the Association of Asian Studies Meeting in 2013, to which supplementary essays have been added. The full group of authors do not ap- pear ever to have convened in the same room. As a result, the papers do not show extensive evidence of conversation between the authors, and there are some unresolved discrepancies on minor points. Nevertheless in their diverse takes on the wanton woman they open a fruitful new vein of inquiry for the field. Whether intentionally or not, the volume ends up illustrating how differ- ently the yinfu (or permutations thereof) functions in different contexts. De- pending on the time of a literary work, the genre, the gender of the author, the urban or rural origins of the material, and the social class of the women de- scribed, the yinfu can take on different shapes and invoke a range of attitudes, even though the basic connection to sexual love never disappears. To give evi- dence of this variety, let us begin by considering the time of writing. In some ways this is the most important variable in the collection. This is because the essays are arranged more or less in chronological order, which also turns out to sort them (very roughly) in terms of genre. Most of these variables function in tandem with at least one other, but I will begin with time and then demon- strate how others enter in. My ordering differs somewhat from that in the volume. With material this rich and complicated, a number of different orderings can be proposed. The essays are largely focused on the Ming and Qing. Several underscore the familiar point that this was the era in which certain kinds of drama and fiction began to flourish. Furthermore articles by each of the two editors assert that the down-to-earth quality of such writing signals the beginning of something that could be called modern. Mark Stevenson’s essay on “male homoerotic women” takes up the case of the “penetrated” male lover in homoerotic stories. He makes the case that some of this literature presents such lovers as if they were chaste women. Drawing evidence from several late-Ming short story col- lections, he goes on to show that a whole four-tiered sequence of wantonness Downloaded from Brill.com01/28/2019 01:36:03PM via University of Hong Kong