The Boundaries of Obscenity: Transgressive Sexual Narratives in Feng Menglong’s (1574-1646) Short-Story Fiction

Abstract This study proposes that the transgressive mode of pornographic fiction and the moralistic mode of cautionary fiction should not to be perceived in stark mutual opposition. To this aim, it explores the simultaneous presence and ambiguous intermingling of such modes in late Ming fiction, with a focus on Feng Menglong’s 1620s collections of short-stories San yan (Three words). The essay reviews a number of their stories featuring transgressive sexual narratives and ideological stances that are often detectable in contemporaneous pornographic fictional works as well. The essay’s final section concentrates on a short-story from the collection Xingshi hengyan (Eternal words to awaken the world) devoted to the Prince of Hailing – a Jin dynasty (1115-1234) ruler and legendary standard of sexual debauchery – and discusses its relationship with other biographies about him that circulated in the late Ming period, in particular the pornographic novella Hailing yishi (Forgotten stories on the Prince of Hailing), most likely the source of the story in question.