Keith McMahon
Professor, Chinese Language and Literature
East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Kansas

Keith McMahon studies Ming and Qing fiction, male and female character types in Chinese fiction, Chinese eroticism, the culture of opium smoking in 19th century China and Euro-America, the structure of sexuality in late imperial China, and the history of polygamy and sexual politics in the imperial palace.

He received his B.A. in French and Comparative Literature from Indiana University, his M.A. in Chinese from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Chinese from Princeton University. He studied one year of Chinese in Taiwan and did Ph.D. and post-doctorate research in Shanghai and Beijing for a total of five years. He has taught at the University of Kansas since 1984, where he was chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures from 1996 to 2008. He taught one semester at the University of California at Berkeley in 2002.

Recently he has written on opium smoking and modern subjectivity in 19th and 20th century China and Euro-America; nineteenth-century fiction, including sequels to Dream of the Red Chamber; polygyny and sexuality in China on the verge of modernity; and prostitution in late Qing fiction. He has lectured in Chinese and English on these topics in the United States, China, Taiwan, Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, and France. He has published four books, Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-century Chinese Fiction (Brill, 1988), Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male/Female Relations in Eighteenth-century Chinese Fiction (Duke, 1995), The Fall of the God of Money: Opium Smoking in Nineteenth-century China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), and Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China in China on the Verge of Modernity (University of Hawaii Press, 2010). He is currently writing a multi-volume history of wives and concubines of Chinese rulers from the legendary past to the end of the Qing dynasty.

Books:

Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction

This book explores late Ming vernacular fiction focusing on the exposition of sexual transgression and the ideology of the containment of desire. Related topics include the theme of causality and its role in the story's mapping of the logic of adultery, adultery as an emblem of the woman's escape from containment, and the use of the narrative themes as a locus of sexual transgression.

Review by Katherine Carlitz, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 48, No. 2 (May, 1989), pp. 368-369.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2057407

Review by David Rolston, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 12, (Dec., 1990), pp. 147-150.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/495235

Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction

Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, the book examines how polygamous privilege functions in these novels and provides one of the first full accounts of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China.

Review by Ellen Widmer, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 18, (Dec., 1996), pp. 228-231.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/495645

Review by Daria Berg, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 61, No. 1 (1998), pp. 180-181.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3107349

Review by Jeannette L. Faurot, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 55, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 444-445.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2943383

Review by Susan Mann, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jun., 1997), pp. 262-270.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2719369

Review by Frank Dikötter, The China Quarterly, No. 148, Special Issue: Contemporary Taiwan (Dec., 1996), pp. 1392-1393.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/655550

The Fall of the God of Money: Opium Smoking in Nineteenth-century China

In this first cross-cultural study of opium in China, the book explores early Western observations of opium smoking, early definitions of addiction, the formation of arguments for and against the legalization of opium, the portrayals of opium smoking in Chinese poetry and prose, and scenes of opium-smoking interactions among male and female smokers and smokers of all social levels in 19th-century China.

Review by Lars Peter Laamann, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 68, No. 3 (2005), pp. 494-495.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20181972

Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity

The book provides a literary history of the normative ideal of polygamy from the late Ming to the late Qing, countering the ideal with the theme of sublime love between two people. It argues that the fantasies of polygamy had intimate ties to the imagination of political power and sheds new light on texts that have been increasingly employed to redefine China's literary transition to modernity. The book reads late Qing love stories in a historically symbolic way by taking them as part of a larger fantasy of Chinese civilization undergoing fundamental crisis.

Review by Paul Keulemans, Journal of Asian Studies, 69.4 (2010): pp. 1197-1198.

Review by Rainier Lanselle, Etudes chinoises, vol XXIX (2010) pp. 357-362.

Review by Susan Mann, Journal of Chinese Studies, 52 (2010), pp. 11-14.

Review by Roland Altenburger, Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China, 12.2 (2010), pp. 353-356


Education:

Education in Taiwan and China:

Research in China:

Representative Publications:

In Chinese:

Li Ling 李零 talks about Ma Kemeng 马克梦



Keith McMahon

Deborah and Keith at Col du Galibier, biking in the French Alps, July 2010