专业学者的严谨八卦，
深入研究中国古代皇帝、后妃的亲密生活
◎ 编辑推荐
☆皇帝被称为『天子』，那么宫廷里的后妃大概就是『天女』了。宫廷生活一直是公众的兴趣点，但充斥着大量的戏说和野史。作者以丰富的史料和扎实的研究，从正史的角度，讲述了宋朝至清朝历代后妃、宫女的典型经历与事迹。
☆皇帝不仅是我们熟悉的帝国统治者，也是儿子、丈夫 、父亲；后 妃不仅依附于皇帝生活，也在某些特殊时刻掌握了滔天的权势，决定王朝的前途命运。比如北宋时坚决反对王安石变法的曹太后、高太后；明成化帝的万贵妃，年长皇帝17岁却长久盛宠不衰；明嘉靖帝时的壬寅宫变，杨金英等宫女难以忍受皇帝的多疑暴戾，趁其熟睡之际险些将之勒死；明天启帝的乳母客氏利用皇帝的信任，与大宦官、对食丈夫魏忠贤一起横行后宫，使天启帝无子而终；清康熙帝有54位嫔妃，生育了56名子女，后宫一片和谐，宫斗失去土壤；清乾隆帝没有宠妃，却独爱和珅；慈禧作为帝制中国*后的女性实权者，关于她的传说，到底是真是假？
☆除了史籍文献，作者的研究还关注了《金枝欲孽》《甄嬛传》等热门宫廷剧，用严谨而不失轻松的笔触，探讨了宫廷后妃的生活和她们面临的各种困难与挑战，使读者可以透彻了解古代后妃的真实生活情况。
◎ 内容简介
作者充分利用古籍官修史书和时人笔记小说，兼及当代国内外学者的优秀研究成果，梳理了宋朝至清朝历代后妃的典型经历与事迹，围绕一夫多妻制度下的后宫关系和女性统治两个焦点，考察不同朝代选拔宫廷女性时的不同倾向、她们的生育与受宠情况、她们的品阶与晋封、她们与奴婢的关系、她们与娘家的关系等主题，探讨了宫廷后妃的生活和她们面临的各种困难与挑战，使读者可以透彻了解古代后妃的真实生活情况。
◎ 学者推荐
倾国倾城母仪天下的后妃们，始终笼罩着皇室、权力和政治的神秘面纱，她们作为女人的情感与欲望以及妻子或母亲的角色及践行，往往罕为人知。汉学家马克梦借助史籍与文学的魔力，导引我们穿越浩渺历史时空，观览这部盛演千年波澜跌宕的禁宫热剧。
——潘建国，北京大学中文系教授
马克梦为我们提供了一个生动、博学、全面的关于中国君主后宫的描述。从宋到清，所有著名的叙事和轶事都被记录在这本迷人的书中。
—— 达米安•肖桑德（Damien Chaussende），法国国家科学院教授
本书是西方第一本深入研究中国古代皇帝、后妃、男女情人亲密生活的著作。基于广博的数百条原始史料和二手资料，马克梦阐述了皇室婚姻的细节和这些关系对理解中国历史的意义。本书对中国的学者、学生和全球学者都极具吸引力。
—— 宋汉理（Harriet Zurndorfer ），荷兰莱顿大学教授

This volume completes Keith McMahon’s acclaimed history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of the emperor’s plural wives as mere victims or playthings, the book considers empresses and concubines as full-fledged participants in palace life, whether as mothers, wives, or go-betweens in the emperor’s relations with others in the palace. Although restrictions on women’s participation in politics increased dramatically after Empress Wu in the Tang, the author follows the strong and active women, of both high and low rank, who continued to appear. They counseled emperors, ghostwrote for them, oversaw succession when they died, and dominated them when they were weak. They influenced the emperor’s relationships with other women and enhanced their aura and that of the royal house with their acts of artistic and religious patronage. Dynastic history ended in China when the prohibition that women should not rule was defied for the final time by Dowager Cixi, the last great monarch before China’s transformation into a republic.

作者充分利用古籍官修史书和时人笔记小说，兼及当代国内外学者的优秀研究成果，梳理了宋朝至清朝历代后妃的典型经历与事迹，围绕一夫多妻制度下的后宫关系和女性统治两个焦点，考察不同朝代选拔宫廷女性时的不同倾向、她们的生育与受宠情况、她们的品阶与晋封、她们与奴婢的关系、她们与娘家的关系等主题，探讨了宫廷后妃的生活和她们面临的各种困难与挑战，使读者可以透彻了解古代后妃的真实生活情况。

Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China.
In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as well-known as Dream of the Red Chamber, Keith McMahon identifies a sexual economy defined by the figures of the "miser" and the "shrew"—caricatures of the retentive, self-containing man and the overflowing, male-enervating woman. Among these and other characters, the author explores the issues surrounding the practice of polygamy, the logic of its overvaluation of masculinity, and the nature of sexuality generally in Chinese society. How does the man with many wives manage and justify his sexual authority? Why and how might he escape or limit this presumed authority, sometimes to the point of portraying himself as abject before the shrewish woman? How do women accommodate or coddle the man, or else oppose, undermine, or remold him? And in what sense does the man place himself lower than the spiritually and morally superior woman?
The most extensive English-language study of Chinese literature from the eighteenth century, this examination of polygamy will interest not only students of Chinese history, culture, and literature but also all those concerned with histories of gender and sexuality.

A number of features characterize late Ming vernacular fiction as part of the general cultural expansion of that period. These features centrally include the exposition of sexual transgression and the function of containment, by which is meant the ideology of the control of desires. The late Ming writers are studiously devoted to illustrating minute, obscene, or erotic details that belief the decorum of the orthodox surface. However, this subversiveness of detail decreases in intensity from the late Ming to the early Qing, when values of containment are reinvoked. Related topics are: 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 topos of the gap in the wall as a locus of sexual transgression.

In Saying All That Can Be Said, Keith McMahon presents the first full analysis of the sexually explicit portrayals in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Countering common views of those portrayals as “just sex” or as “bad sex,” he shows that they are rich in thematic meaning and loaded with social and aesthetic purpose.

McMahon places the novel in the historical context of Chinese sexual culture, from which Jin Ping Mei inherits the style of the elegant, metaphorical description of erotic pleasure, but which the anonymous author extends in an exploration of the explicit, the obscene, and the graphic. The novel uses explicit description to evaluate and comment on characters, situations, and sexual and psychic states of being. Echoing the novel’s way of taking sex as a vehicle for reading the world, McMahon celebrates the richness and exuberance of Jin Ping Mei’s language of sex, which refuses imprisonment within the boundaries of orthodox culture’s cleanly authoritative style, and which continues to inspire admiration from readers around the world. Saying All That Can Be Said will change the way we think about sexual culture in premodern China.