Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China: Society, Culture, and Modernity in Li Yu's World Book

A tremendous work that may interest one or two of folks on the planet, and which yet, despite seeming almost desperately niche-driven, instead is a colossal and inspiring work of history reminding us there is such a thing as art-as-dissent.
Succinctly, this is a work studying the encoding done by Song era poets and painters. Much like Gothic cathedral-making, for example in the porch iconography, there was a rich, lustrous language of symbols at work that those in the know could convey to others. In the case of Murck's focus, those in the know were defamed and defanged court officials raging against policy-changes and then their resultant exile to the area around XiaoXiang in southern China. To grouse and bitch and snipe, poets referenced classic poets like Du Fu, among others, articulating a rich secret code of imagery that their peers and contemporaries could understand. Painters like Song Di and later Wang Hong, incorporated these images into visual works such as the "Eight Views of XiaoXiang" (geese=travail; mists=vitality and obscurity; rain=sorrow, and so on, you get the picture).
Rich with plates of the paintings in question and insanely detailed analyses of the poems and their arsenal of imagery, Murck shows how crucial dissent in the arts could be, and probably should be, I guess. Is Disney reading this? Probably not.