Examines and reassesses the life and work of Ming-era poet Ruan Dacheng.

The Many Faces of Ruan Dacheng is the first monograph in English on a controversial Ming dynasty literary figure. It examines and reassesses the life and work of Ruan Dacheng (1587–1646), a poet, dramatist, and politician in the late Ming period. Ruan Dacheng was in his own time a highly regarded poet, although he is now better known as a dramatist. He was notorious as a “treacherous official” of the Ming–Qing transition, and as a result, his literary work has been neglected and undervalued. Hardie argues that Ruan’s literary work is of much greater significance in the history of Chinese literature than has generally been recognized since his own time. Ruan, rather than being a transgressive figure, is actually a very typical late Ming literatus, and as such his attitudes towards identity and authenticity can add to our understanding of these issues in late Ming intellectual history. These insights will impact the cultural and intellectual history of late imperial China.