For mid-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European readers, the Haoqiu zhuan epitomized China’s “whole system of manners,” showing at one and the same time the orderly civility and the disorderly excess of the Chinese. These notions of wholeness and reversibility of order constitute the “anthropological” turn of Western knowledge, which was predicated on the finitude and perversion of humanity. Against the grain of such order-disorder totality, I read along with late Edo writers, whose rewriting of the Haoqiu zhuan focused on ninkyō/renxia (knight-errantry), a course of action presenting itself as an extreme case in which the norm is overextended to the point that it is no longer recognizable. The two competitive forms of knowledge—anthropology and case thinking—articulate the two sides of theatricality across the globe under the sway of commerce and print.

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In his provocative article, Franco Moretti raises issues central to the criticism of the novel, and his insights generated a vibrant cross-disciplinary conversation between the authors of this response. In this essay, we introduce several alternative approaches that redirect and extend Moretti's argument. Instead of reifying the opposition between Chinese novels (as aesthetic objects) and English novels (as commodities), we see the chiasmus of aestheticization and commodification in both novel traditions. Further, the quantitative approach to the novel field and the focus on prose excludes hybrid forms produced and consumed by women readers. The opposition of extensive, desultory reading to aesthetic concentration, we propose, came into being in the critical enterprise contemporaneous with the 'rise' of the novel -an enterprise grounded in the gendered economy of popular reading.

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