The volume presents the documented history of the marginalized tradition of erotic lyricism that extolled amorous desire and romantic love, “intoxicating the heart and swaying the soul” (醉心蕩魄). Xiangyan 香艷, rendered with “fragrance and charm” or “fragrance and dazzlement”, and summarizes the sensualist lyrical poetry and literature. The book uncovers and examines several primary sources, such as the monumental anthologies of sensual poetry compiled in both the late Ming and the late Qing periods, prefaces, and modern magazines, most of them translated for the first time.

Li Xiaorong – author of valuable articles and of the volume Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China: Transforming the Inner Chambers – is successful in accomplishing the aims of her project, and answering the questions she raises in the introduction. “What did it mean aesthetically and politically to write about sensuality (i.e., the corporeal body and amorous desire) in the historical contexts? What is written and made into poetic discourse and aesthetics? What is made political? Why can the sensual poetry and poets examined in this book be deemed a significant alternative literary trend and intellectual movement in Chinese history? How and why does this little studied aspect of Chinese history matter? Deeply intertwined with several well-known intellectual movements but previously not recognized as such, how does it enable us to better understand these broader movements?” (pp. 38–9).

The six chapters of the book revolve around the above questions by focusing on the historical evolution of this poetic tradition in two moments, the late Ming and late Qing–early Republic. The first three chapters focus on the rebellion of the major sensualist poets of the late Ming against the civil service institution and its ideology. Education was centred on the preparation of students for the civil examination system, but the number of appointments was far fewer than the number of students. Thus in most cases, students failed and swelled the ranks of a newly emergent intelligentsia. Among them, a certain sense of disillusionment with imperial power grew, and new countercultures and lifestyles emerged. Thus, Wang Cihui expresses his shift of interest from the public career to the pleasures of life: “I have accepted that my luck in love compromised my talent for fame” (p. 91). The “cult of qing” was an expression of these circles. Li Xiaorong places the major sensualist poets as a radical branch of this cult and describes their challenge to poetic, aesthetic, and socioethical norms. Moreover, she demonstrates they also developed a distinctive poetics and aesthetics that sublimate sensuality and romance into a moral goal in its own right. Emblematic is the praise for eccentricity and obsessions, and for instance the new lifestyle of “reclusion in sensual beauty”, seyin 色隱. The representation of indulgence in sensuality and romantic relationships challenged the Confucian rules and culture.

The second half of the book deals with the second trend of sensual poetries and brings to light how some late Qing and Republican intellectuals – among them the members of the South Society (Nan she 南社), as well as the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School writers – revisited tradition for reforming aesthetic rules, literature, and life in periods of great social and political crises. Here the most original part of the book is elaborated by taking the apparently paradoxical thesis of the creative association of the sensualist genre with “the nation's reform” (維新) and “national learning” (國學). The paradox is that both the Qing Reformist movement and neo-traditionalists were morally suspicious of this “outrageous” literary genre. The sensual lyricism writers of late imperial and early Republican China went on rebelling against orthodox Neo-Confucianism, but also the radical cultural programmes of the late Qing Occidentalists and the New Culture Movement of the Republic. Their reformist spirit did not accept the suppression of the Chinese lyrical tradition: they shared a “neo-traditionalist” approach in preserving an element of native Chinese culture but were not “reactionary”, as they challenged traditional moral and aesthetic standards, subverting the Confucian hierarchy of relations and the orthodox socially oriented Neo-Confucianism; at the same time their counterhegemonic discourse was against the radical cultural agendas of the late Qing Reform and the New Culture Movement. They promoted classical erotic lyricism and the fulfilment of individual expression of desires against the old and new theories assigning sociopolitical functions to literature.

The uncovered passages from important but neglected writings are well translated and clearly explained and annotated, so that the book is not only a repository of new and conventional love motifs but is also very readable. Li highlights the peculiar historical role of this literary genre, its continuity and discontinuity, its tradition and its political implications, and emphasizes the literary modernization operated by the sensuality and “decadence” of China's erotic lyrical tradition.

By carefully examining literary materials, this is a valuable contribution to Chinese literary and aesthetic studies, but also to the intellectual history of 300 years, by situating the two crucial fin-de-siècle periods of decadence and innovation in their historical and cultural milieu. It is a deep study well documented and endowed with convincing arguments on the conception of eroticism in modern China and connections between sensualist poetry and politics until modern times, through allegories that free literature from Confucian moral rules and political order instead of subjecting it to them: