In the film adaptation of Lust, Caution, the importance of sex is apparent. This is not necessarily the case in Se, Jie. In Eileen Chang’s story, there is an interconnection between sex, death, and a ring. This relationship is portrayed differently in Julia Lovell’s Lust, Caution. Viewing Eileen Chang as world literature reveals similarities and differences between Se, Jie and Lust, Caution and their different thematic emphases. This article explores how the imageries of the ring, sex, and death are interrelated. The transaction involving the ring in Chang’s text is similar to a sexual transaction. Analyzing the difference between the source and the target texts reveals how Lovell places a “heavier” emphasis on women’s bodies, suggesting the suppression women suffer in a patriarchal society. While the thematic importance of death is also present in Lust, Caution, it is brought out by the notion of foreignness and undecipherability.

Through studying Volpone’s three bastard children – the dwarf, the androgyne and the eunuch – from the theoretical arguments of Freud, Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, this book discusses how Jonson’s comedies are built upon the tension between death, castration and nothingness on one hand, and the comic slippage of identities in the city on the other. This study understands Jonson, first and foremost, as a comedy writer, linking his work with modern film comedies such as the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Monty Python. It is a new approach to Jonsonian studies, responding to the current Marxist-Lacanian studies of literature, film and culture made popular by scholars such as Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar. While the book pays close attention to the historical context of Jonson’s time, it brings him into the twenty-first century by discussing early modern comedies with modern critical theories and film.

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