Shades of Justice: Debating Law and Legal Culture in Early Modern China

Abstract

My dissertation examines critiques of law and justice in vernacular literature and drama from the fifteenth century to the early twentieth century. Historians have focused on the increasing professionalization of the legal system and on the popularization of legal knowledge through commercial publishing during this period, but there are few in-depth studies of legal discourse outside the judiciary, and fewer still of literary engagement with the legal system and concepts of justice. My research focuses on works that were widely read and performed in their time, including short stories, plays, novels, and anecdotes. Written to entertain, many of these texts have long been dismissed by scholars as being neither a mature form of literature nor useful historical sources. Yet these writings, innovative in forms and plot designs, are crucial to understanding alternative visions of justice, which were often critical of established judicial reasoning. My research emphasizes the high degree of literary engagement with the law as shown in the intertextuality of literary and legal genres and the fluid boundaries between authors and consumers of crime stories in this period. First, it demonstrates that the legal conversancy among the literati, which was a direct result of the development of an overarching legal system and a prosperous printing industry since the fourteenth century, in turn had a significant impact on the reformation, or even reinvention, of literary genres and narrative traditions. Second, my dissertation shows that law and justice must be understood through the broader concept of legal culture. Law was conceptualized not only by legal professionals as a matter of codes and judicial process, but also by a wide cross-section of society through a variety of cultural narratives, such as Confucian moral values, religious beliefs, and poetic justice as imagined in literary writings.