Her research has been focused on reading Ming-Qing novels within their specific cultural and aesthetic contexts. Although her approach to late-imperial fiction is grounded in the intellectual and cultural context of the period and refers to traditional commentaries for immediate “reader response,” the questions she asks are largely informed by recent critical concerns, particularly in the area of gender theory. Professor Epstein’s first book, Competing Discourses, analyzes the shifting fictional representations of gender and sexual desire from within the context of the neo-Confucian discourse of self-cultivation and the late-Ming cult of qing (sentiment). She argues that a poetics of gender based on yinyang numerology is an essential structural element in many Ming-Qing novels.