Scott W Gregory

Interests

Research

Late imperial Chinese literature; history of the book and publishing in China; Chinese religions; exegetical traditions

Teaching

Chinese literature, history, and culture; Cultures of Asia; Buddhist Studies

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Gregory, S. W. (2023).

  Bandits in print :  The Water Margin and the transformations of vernacular fiction

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Journals/Publications

• Gregory, S. W. (2020). Ming Vernacular Fiction Studies: A View of the Field from the Inside by Robert Hegel. Ming Studies, 2020(82), 63-72. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/0147037X.2020.1766803
• Gregory, S. W. (2017). ‘The Wuding Editions’: Printing, Power, and Vernacular Fiction in the Ming Dynasty. East Asian Publishing and Society, 7(1), 1-29. doi:10.1163/22106286-12341302
• Gregory, S. W. (2017). “The Wuding Editions”: Printing, Power, and Vernacular Fiction in the Ming Dynasty. East Asian Publishing and Society, 7(1), 1-29.
• Gregory, S. W. (2015). Daydreaming Dynasty: The Eunuch Sanbao's Journeys in the Western Seas and “Present-Dynasty” Fiction of the Ming. Ming Studies, 2015, 10-28.
  More info

  Though many novels produced in the Ming dynasty were based on historical subjects, only a very few were inspired by historical events of the Ming itself. Of those few that were, the so-called “present-dynasty novels,” by far the most complex was the Sanbao taijian xiyang ji 三寶太監西洋記, or The Record of the Eunuch Sanbao's Journeys in the Western Seas. Published in 1598, the novel is a highly fictionalized account of the voyages of Zheng He, which had occurred nearly two centuries previous.
• Gregory, S. W. (2015). REVIEW: Roy, trans. Plum in the Golden Vase Vol. 5. Ming Studies, 62-69.
  More info

  (2015 issue; published in Spring 2016)

Presentations

• Gregory, S. W. (2024, November). The Collapse of Heaven: The Taiping Civil War and Chinese Literature and Culture by Huan Jin (book talk roundtable discussant). Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Seattle, Washington, March. online: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Hawaii.
• Gregory, S. W. (2019, October). "'A Farrago of Miraculous Events': Sanbao’s Journey to the Western Seas as 'Global Buddhist Irony'?". Western Branch of the American Oriental Society. Davis, California: American Oriental Society.
  More info

  What sort of novel is Journey to the Western Seas? The highly fictionalized account of the travels of Zheng He from the late Ming owes obvious debts to its near-contemporary Journey to the West. Lu Xun categorized it, along with its more famous cousin, as a “novel of gods and demons (shenmo xiaoshuo)” due to its fantastical elements. However, that label fails to capture the rich depiction of what modern scholars might refer to as a “world-system” in either novel—one that was very real to the novel’s early modern readership, combining the officially-sanctioned “tianxia,” Buddhist cosmology, and the “vernacular world” of growing global trade routes and consumer culture. The protagonists of Journey to the Western Seas travel through peripheries, far from the imperial center, and must literally and figuratively navigate through the unknown. The confusing, simultaneously centered and uncentered world-system of the novel is mirrored by the one in which the novel’s late Ming readers lived. Key elements of navigating that world were both Mahayana Buddhism and self- referential irony. Though these two elements might seem at first to have little in common, they were in fact both tools for dispelling illusion and pointing—however indirectly—toward authenticity. They were also both regional or even global phenomena interrelated with the rise of the early modern world of the sixteenth century: As several recent studies of “comparative early modernities” have pointed out, ironic literary modes developed roughly simultaneously in Ming China, Japan, and Europe. Other recent studies in the field of religion have suggested a “regional,” if not “global,” Buddhism operating in a similar, networked sphere in East Asia. This paper examines Journey to the Western Seas as a site where these phenomena intersect, reconsidering it as more than a mere novel of the supernatural.
• Gregory, S. W. (2022, November). Beyond the Margins: Sanbao’s Journey to the Western Seas, “Global Buddhist Irony,” and Commentary without Commentary. Open Margins: Voice and Image from Text to Paratext. Academia Sinica, Taiwan: Institute of Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica.
• Gregory, S. W. (2017, February). “The Bandits’ Reception: Textual Variation, Print, and Genre in the Ming Novel The Water Margin”. Voicing Alterity: East Asian Texts in the Language of Others. Arizona State University.
  More info

  Invited talk as part of workshop
• Gregory, S. W. (2017, March). “‘The Art of Subtle Phrasing Has Been Extinguished’: The Outlaw as Exemplar of Self-Cultivation in Jin Shengtan’s Water Margin”. Association for Asian Studies annual conference. Toronto, Canada: Association for Asian Studies.

Reviews

• Gregory, S. W. (2022. Writing Pirates: Vernacular Fiction and Oceans in Late Ming China By Yuanfei Wang. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. viii, 218 pp. ISBN: 9780472132546 (cloth).(pp 585–586). Journal of Asian Studies.