Erotic Enclaves and Contested Beds: Gardens in Pu Songling’s Chuanqi Tales

Abstract: This article examines the literary garden depicted by Pu Songling (1640-1715) in his Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異 (Liaozhai's records of the strange; 1766). These enchanted, deserted, and haunted gardens function as metaphors for the contested ground on which some key Ming-Qing intellectual issues are debated. The article examines Pu’s depiction of qing 情,an important concept reflecting the philosophical and literary trends of the time, and shows that in the process of constructing literary gardens, Pu challenges the intellectual issues of his time and dissolves the boundaries between normal and abnormal, reality and ideal, death and life, and order and disorder.