In late eleventh-century China, a group of disaffected government officials, their careers in disarray and their lives sometimes at risk, found ways to express political dissent and personal grievances through the use of literary allusions. Expressing dissatisfaction could be dangerous, so these allusions had to be oblique; a reference to spotted bamboo, for instance, evoked an ancient legend about loyal wives searching in vain for their dead lord. Recognizing such an allusion in a poem or in a painting, and understanding its implications in the contemporary context, required considerable erudition as well as a sympathetic alertness to the author’s intentions. Circulating among like-minded people, these coded expressions of protest and discontent were relatively secure from outsiders’ scrutiny. They are even more difficult to access today—or have been, I should say. This impressively researched, deeply ruminated book opens the door to their meaning. Central to this imagery of protest is the cultural history of the XiaoXiang region, an area south of the Yangzi river (corresponding roughly to modern Hunan province) long associated with thwarted hopes, neglected talent, and undeserved rejection, “a place of unjust exile.” Alfreda Murck begins with a compelling account of the history of XiaoXiang literature and its consolidation...