To discuss the supernatural in China is “to talk of foxes and speak of ghosts.” Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter.

Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. As the most ambiguous alien in the late imperial Chinese imagination, the fox reveals which boundaries around the human and the ordinary were most frequently violated and, therefore, most jealously guarded.

Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time: the narrative boundaries of genre and texts; domesticity and the outside world; chaos and order; the human and the non-human; class; gender; sexual relations; and the progression from animal to monster to transcendent. As “middle creatures,” foxes were morally ambivalent, endowed with superhuman but not quite divine powers; like humans, they occupied a middle space between the infernal and the celestial.

Once there was a Quechua folktale. It begins with a trickster fox's penis with a will of its own and ends with a daughter returning to parents who cannot recognize her until she recounts the uncanny adventures that have befallen her since she ran away from home. Following the strange twists and turnings of this tale, Catherine J. Allen weaves a narrative of Quechua storytelling and story listening that links these arts to others—fabric weaving, in particular—and thereby illuminates enduring Andean strategies for communicating deeply felt cultural values.

In this masterful work of literary nonfiction, Allen draws out the connections between two prominent markers of ethnic identity in Andean nations—indigenous language and woven cloth—and makes a convincing case that the connection between language and cloth affects virtually all aspects of expressive culture, including the performing arts. As she explores how a skilled storyteller interweaves traditional tales and stock characters into new stories, just as a skilled weaver combines traditional motifs and colors into new patterns, she demonstrates how Andean storytelling and weaving both embody the same kinds of relationships, the same ideas about how opposites should meet up with each other. By identifying these pervasive patterns, Allen opens up the Quechua cultural world that unites story tellers and listeners, as listeners hear echoes and traces of other stories, layering over each other in a kind of aural palimpsest.