Writing Pirates: Vernacular Fiction and Oceans in Late Ming China

Challenging existing scholarship on late imperial Chinese literature that tends to presume an inland China that is insular from the maritime world, Writing Pirates tells a new story of how Chinese literary production was connected to the emerging discourse of pirates and the sea. During the times when "Japanese" pirates raided southeast coastal China, when Hideyoshi invaded Korea, when Europeans sailed for overseas territories, Chinese maritime merchants and emigrants thrived on the oceans and settled in Southeast Asia to become Chinese diaspora, and late Ming Chinese scholars composed travel writings, histories, and vernacular fiction to narrate pirates and China's Orient in maritime Asia. Using post-colonial theory on empire, race and ethnicity, and migration, and the narrative theories of Hayden White and Mikhail Bakhtin, the book continues the ongoing discussions of Chinese diaspora and the debates on vernacular language, dialects and mandarin in the thriving field of Sinophone studies into the late Ming period. The book also pushed the multicultural and multi-lingual discussions of New Qing history into the late Ming period. The book further paves new ground on the relations between transnationalism and Chinese literature by looking at migrants, foreigners, and renegades in Chinese literature; Chinese narratives of cross-border war and diplomacy; translation studies through examining Chinese transcription and translation of waka; the printing, evolution, and transmission of a pirate's romance in Jiangnan and Vietnam; and the late Ming debates on authenticity.