To discuss the supernatural in China is "to talk of foxes and speak
of ghosts." Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes,
shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of
species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes
were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both
tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the
most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter.
Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien
and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. As the most
ambiguous alien in the late imperial Chinese imagination, the fox
reveals which boundaries around the human and the ordinary were
most frequently violated and, therefore, most jealously
guarded.
Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated
by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change
over time: the narrative boundaries of genre and texts; domesticity
and the outside world; chaos and order; the human and the
non-human; class; gender; sexual relations; and the progression
from animal to monster to transcendent. As "middle creatures,"
foxes were morally ambivalent, endowed with superhuman but not
quite divine powers; like humans, they occupied a middle space
between the infernal and the celestial.
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