Peony Lantern Tales

“The Story of the Peony Lantern” by the Chinese author Qu You (1347–1433) traveled across lingual, cultural, and geopolitical borders in early modern East Asia. The original tale, set in fourteenth-century Ningbo, China, is one of ghostly seduction and murder, but it continued to transform as it traveled from city to city and in its encounters with characters from other texts, publishing networks, and countless readers in the Sinosphere. Fumiko Jōo closely analyzes the cultural and societal stru