Materializing Desire in Two Literary Traditions

This chapter approaches the erotic from a broadly comparative, global perspective by constrasting the material tokens of love that appear in Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina and Wang Shifu’s The Story of the Western Wing (西廂記), both of which offer notorious representations of wanton desire. By comparing Melibea’s cord with Cui Yingying’s belt, and Calisto’s lute/vihuela with Zhang Junrui’s zither, telling resonances emerge both in the literary materialization of physical longing and in the pornographic suggestions of possession, stroking, and play inherent in the objects used to embody longing. This comparative approach similarly opens the canons both of Spanish and Chinese literature to fresh critical possibilities.