ABSTRACT
In mainland China, dozens of reprints were published, most of which expurgated editions. Of all the events, the establishment of the China Academic Society of Jin Ping Mei in 1989 could be considered as a high point. The scarcity of research on the English translations of JPM in China and elsewhere is surprising. Rhetorically, JPM is a paragon of intertextuality which incorporates a wide range of texts into its textual universe. While the novel in the western sense is astutely described by Bakhtin as a 'most fluid of genres' the Chinese xiaoshuo is equally, if not more, slippery a term. In the first place, Egerton does not use Latin because the 'lengthy passages of erotic descriptions' contain 'Chinese elements' that 'cannot be fully domesticated', but because the literary censorship of his time rules out the possibility of publication if the passages were translated into English.
