Carnival in China: A Reading of the "Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan"

Daria Berg's book, Carnival in China: A Reading of the Xingshi yinyuan zhuan (2002), explores how a seventeenth-century Chinese dystopian novel portrays local society in comic and grotesque close-up. Using an array of sources-fiction, poetry, texts on medical ethics, religious thought, political and philosophical treatises, morality books and local gazetteers-Carnival in China develops a new style of reading that provides insight into the desires, dreams, fears and nightmares of seventeenth-century Chinese citizens.