Feeling The Past In Seventeenth Century China

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Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China

Xiaoqiao Ling
Feeling the Past in Seventeenth Century China Book PDF

Author : Xiaoqiao Ling
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2021-02-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781684176410

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Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China by Xiaoqiao Ling Pdf

During the Manchu conquest of China (1640s–1680s), the Qing government mandated that male subjects shave their hair following the Manchu style. It was a directive that brought the physical body front and center as the locus of authority and control. Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China highlights the central role played by the body in writers’ memories of lived experiences during the Ming–Qing cataclysm. For traditional Chinese men of letters, the body was an anchor of sensory perceptions and emotions. Sight, sound, taste, and touch configured ordinary experiences next to traumatic events, unveiling how writers participated in an actual and imagined community of like-minded literary men. In literature from this period, the body symbolizes the process by which individual memories transform into historical knowledge that can be transmitted across generations. The ailing body interprets the Manchu presence as an epidemic to which Chinese civilization is not immune. The bleeding body, cast as an aesthetic figure, helps succeeding generations internalize knowledge inherited from survivors of dynastic conquest as a way of locating themselves in collective remembrance. This embodied experience of the past reveals literature’s mission of remembrance as, first and foremost, a moral endeavor in which literary men serve as architects of cultural continuity.

Towers in the Void

S. E. Kile
Towers in the Void Book PDF

Author : S. E. Kile
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2023-05-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231558242

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Towers in the Void by S. E. Kile Pdf

The maverick cultural entrepreneur Li Yu survived the tumultuous Ming-Qing dynastic transition of the mid-seventeenth century through a commercially successful practice founded on intermedial experimentation. He engaged an astonishingly broad variety of cultural forms: from theatrical performance and literary production to fashion and wellness; from garden and interior design to the composition of letters and administrative documents. Drawing on his nonliterary work to reshape his writing, he translated this wide-ranging expertise into easily transmittable woodblock-printed form. Towers in the Void is a groundbreaking analysis of Li Yu’s work across these varied fields. It uses the concept of media to traverse them, revealing Li Yu’s creative enterprise as a remaking of early modern media forms. S. E. Kile argues that Li Yu’s cultural experimentation exploits the seams between language and the tangible world. He draws attention to the materiality of particular media forms, expanding the scope of early modern media by interweaving books, buildings, and bodies. Within and across these media, Li Yu’s cultural entrepreneurship with the technology of the printed book embraced its reproducibility while retaining a personal touch. His literary practice informed his garden design and, conversely, he drew on garden design to transform the vernacular short story. Ideas for extreme body modification in Li Yu’s fiction remade the possibilities of real human bodies in his nonfiction writing. Towers in the Void calls for seeing books, bodies, and buildings as interlinked media forms, both in early modern China and in today’s media-saturated world, positioning the Ming and Qing as a crucial site of global early modern cultural change.

A Topsy-Turvy World

Wilt L. Idema,Wai-yee Li,Stephen H. West
A Topsy Turvy World Book PDF

Author : Wilt L. Idema,Wai-yee Li,Stephen H. West
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2023-10-10
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780231557719

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A Topsy-Turvy World by Wilt L. Idema,Wai-yee Li,Stephen H. West Pdf

Playwriting in many forms flourished during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Shorter theatrical genres in particular offered playwrights opportunities for experimentation with both dramatic form and social critique. Despite their originality and wit, these short plays have been overshadowed by the lengthy masterpieces of the southern drama tradition. A Topsy-Turvy World presents English translations of shorter sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century plays, spotlighting a lesser-known side of Chinese drama. Satirical and often earthy, these mostly one-act plays depict deceit, dissembling, reversed gender roles, and sudden upending of fortunes. With zest and humor, they portray henpecked husbands, supercilious and lustful monks, all-too-human sage kings, disgruntled officials, and overreaching young scholars. These plays provide a glimpse of Chinese daily life and mores even as they question or subvert the boundaries of social, moral, and political order. Each translation is preceded by a short introduction that describes the play’s author, context, formal qualities, and textual history. A Topsy-Turvy World offers a new view of a significant period in the development of the Chinese theatrical tradition and provides insight into the role of drama as cultural critique.

The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE - 800 CE

Robert Ford Campany
The Chinese Dreamscape 300 BCE 800 CE Book PDF

Author : Robert Ford Campany
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2022-03-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781684176427

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The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE - 800 CE by Robert Ford Campany Pdf

Dreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape—an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke—that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions. In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to questions peoples the world over have asked for millennia: What happens when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and nonhuman animals? The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE – 800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated these mysteries and brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures, ancient and contemporary. Taking stock of how Chinese people wrestled with—and celebrated—the strangeness of dreams, Campany asks us to reflect on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming.

Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China

Hsiao-t'i Li
Opera Society and Politics in Modern China Book PDF

Author : Hsiao-t'i Li
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684171019

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Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China by Hsiao-t'i Li Pdf

"Popular operas in late imperial China were a major part of daily entertainment, and were also important for transmitting knowledge of Chinese culture and values. In the twentieth century, however, Chinese operas went through significant changes. During the first four decades of the 1900s, led by Xin Wutai (New Stage) of Shanghai and Yisushe of Xi’an, theaters all over China experimented with both stage and scripts to present bold new plays centering on social reform. Operas became closely intertwined with social and political issues. This trend toward “politicization” was to become the most dominant theme of Chinese opera from the 1930s to the 1970s, when ideology-laden political plays reflected a radical revolutionary agenda.Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, this book focuses on the reformed operas staged in Shanghai and Xi’an. By presenting extensive information on both traditional/imperial China and revolutionary/Communist China, it reveals the implications of these “modern” operatic experiences and the changing features of Chinese operas throughout the past five centuries. Although the different genres of opera were watched by audiences from all walks of life, the foundations for opera’s omnipresence completely changed over time."

Just a Song

Stephen Owen
Just a Song Book PDF

Author : Stephen Owen
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684170982

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Just a Song by Stephen Owen Pdf

"“Song Lyric,” ci, remains one of the most loved forms of Chinese poetry. From the early eleventh century through the first quarter of the twelfth century, song lyric evolved from an impromptu contribution in a performance practice to a full literary genre, in which the text might be read more often than performed. Young women singers, either indentured or private entrepreneurs, were at the heart of song practice throughout the period; the authors of the lyrics were notionally mostly male. A strange gender dynamic arose, in which men often wrote in the voice of a woman and her imagined feelings, then appropriated that sensibility for themselves.As an essential part of becoming literature, a history was constructed for the new genre. At the same time the genre claimed a new set of aesthetic values to radically distinguish it from older “Classical Poetry,” shi. In a world that was either pragmatic or moralizing (or both), song lyric was a discourse of sensibility, which literally gave a beautiful voice to everything that seemed increasingly to be disappearing in the new Song dynasty world of righteousness and public advancement."

Imperiled Destinies

Franciscus Verellen
Imperiled Destinies Book PDF

Author : Franciscus Verellen
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684171026

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Imperiled Destinies by Franciscus Verellen Pdf

"Imperiled Destinies" examines the evolution of Daoist beliefs about human liability and redemption over eight centuries and outlines ritual procedures for rescuing an ill‐starred destiny. From the second through the tenth century CE, Daoism emerged as a liturgical organization that engaged vigorously with Buddhism and transformed Chinese thinking about suffering, the nature of evil, and the aims of liberation. In the fifth century, elements of classical Daoism combined with Indian yogic practices to interiorize the quest for deliverance. The medieval record portrays a world engulfed by evil, where human existence was mortgaged from birth and burdened by increasing debts and obligations in this world and the next. Against this gloomy outlook, Daoism offered ritual and sacramental instruments capable of acting on the unseen world, providing therapeutic relief and ecstatic release from apprehensions of death, disease, war, spoilt harvests, and loss. Drawing on prayer texts, liturgical sermons, and experiential narratives, Franciscus Verellen focuses on the Daoist vocabulary of bondage and redemption, the changing meanings of sacrifice, and metaphoric conceptualizations bridging the visible and invisible realms. The language of medieval supplicants envisaged the redemption of an imperiled destiny as debt forgiveness, and deliverance as healing, purification, release, or emergence from darkness into light.

Rival Partners

Jieh-min Wu
Rival Partners Book PDF

Author : Jieh-min Wu
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 532 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2023-11-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684176557

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Rival Partners by Jieh-min Wu Pdf

Taiwan has been depicted as an island facing the incessant threat of forcible unification with the People’s Republic of China. Why, then, has Taiwan spent more than three decades pouring capital and talent into China? In award-winning Rival Partners, Wu Jieh-min follows the development of Taiwanese enterprises in China over twenty-five years and provides fresh insights. The geopolitical shift in Asia beginning in the 1970s and the global restructuring of value chains since the 1980s created strong incentives for Taiwanese entrepreneurs to rush into China despite high political risks and insecure property rights. Taiwanese investment, in conjunction with Hong Kong capital, laid the foundation for the world’s factory to flourish in the southern province of Guangdong, but official Chinese narratives play down Taiwan’s vital contribution. It is hard to imagine the Guangdong model without Taiwanese investment, and, without the Guangdong model, China’s rise could not have occurred. Going beyond the received wisdom of the “China miracle” and “Taiwan factor,” Wu delineates how Taiwanese business people, with the cooperation of local officials, ushered global capitalism into China. By partnering with its political archrival, Taiwan has benefited enormously, while helping to cultivate an economic superpower that increasingly exerts its influence around the world.

Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks

Richard G. Wang
Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks Book PDF

Author : Richard G. Wang
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2023-11-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684176540

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Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks by Richard G. Wang Pdf

Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks explores the key role played by elite Daoists in social and cultural life in Ming China, notably by mediating between local networks—biological lineages, territorial communities, temples, and festivals—and the state. They did this through their organization in clerical lineages—their own empire-wide networks for channeling knowledge, patronage, and resources—and by controlling central temples that were nodes of local social structures. In this book, the only comprehensive social history of local Daoism during the Ming largely based on literary sources and fieldwork, Richard G. Wang delineates the interface between local organizations (such as lineages and temple networks) and central state institutions. The first part provides the framework for viewing Daoism as a social institution in regard to both its religious lineages and its service to the state in the bureaucratic apparatus to implement state orthodoxy. The second part follows four cases to reveal the connections between clerical lineages and local networks. Wang illustrates how Daoism claimed a universal ideology and civilizing force that mediated between local organizations and central state institutions, which in turn brought meaning and legitimacy to both local society and the state.

Du Fu Transforms

Lucas Rambo Bender
Du Fu Transforms Book PDF

Author : Lucas Rambo Bender
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 428 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2022-03-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781684176489

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Du Fu Transforms by Lucas Rambo Bender Pdf

Often considered China’s greatest poet, Du Fu (712–770) came of age at the height of the Tang dynasty, in an era marked by confidence that the accumulated wisdom of the precedent cultural tradition would guarantee civilization’s continued stability and prosperity. When his society collapsed into civil war in 755, however, he began to question contemporary assumptions about the role that tradition should play in making sense of experience and defining human flourishing. In this book, Lucas Bender argues that Du Fu’s reconsideration of the nature and importance of tradition has played a pivotal role in the transformation of Chinese poetic understanding over the last millennium. In reimagining his relationship to tradition, Du Fu anticipated important philosophical transitions from the late-medieval into the early-modern period and laid the template for a new and perduring paradigm of poetry’s relationship to ethics. He also looked forward to the transformations his own poetry would undergo as it was elevated to the pinnacle of the Chinese poetic pantheon.

Making the Gods Speak

Vincent Goossaert
Making the Gods Speak Book PDF

Author : Vincent Goossaert
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2023-11-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684176533

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Making the Gods Speak by Vincent Goossaert Pdf

For two millennia, Chinese society has been producing divine revelations on an unparalleled scale, in multifarious genres and formats. This book is the first comprehensive attempt at accounting for the processes of such production. It builds a typology of the various ritual techniques used to make gods present and allow them to speak or write, and it follows the historical development of these types and the revealed teachings they made possible. Within the large array of visionary, mediumistic, and mystical techniques, Vincent Goossaert devotes the bulk of his analysis to spirit-writing, a family of rites that appeared around the eleventh century and gradually came to account for the largest numbers of books and tracts ascribed to the gods. In doing so, he shows that the practice of spirit-writing must be placed within the framework of techniques used by ritual specialists to control human communications with gods and spirits for healing, divining, and self-divinization, among other purposes. Making the Gods Speak thus offers a ritual-centered framework to study revelation in Chinese cultural history and comparatively with the revelatory practices of other religious traditions.

Ethnic Chrysalis

Loretta E. Kim
Ethnic Chrysalis Book PDF

Author : Loretta E. Kim
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684171033

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Ethnic Chrysalis by Loretta E. Kim Pdf

"Ethnic Chrysalis" is the first book in English to cover the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has for centuries inhabited areas now belonging to the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was a formative period for Orochen identity, and its actions preserved the Orochen as a separate ethnic group. While incorporating the Orochen into the imperial political domain through military conscription and compulsory resource extraction, the Qing government created two Orochen subgroups that experienced disparate levels of social and economic autonomy. The use of “Orochen” as an official modifier by Qing officials forms an early layer of the chrysalis that embodies various senses of ethnic identity for people who have been identified, or self‐identified, as Orochen. Since the Qing, the Orochen have continued to cherish the perception that their Qing‐period ancestors were key players in the defense and economy of northeast China. Tracing the evolution of Qing policies toward the Orochen along the Chinese–Russian borderland, Loretta Kim examines how the impact of political organization in one era can endure in a group’s social and cultural values.

The Promise and Peril of Things

Wai-yee Li
The Promise and Peril of Things Book PDF

Author : Wai-yee Li
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2022-05-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231553896

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The Promise and Peril of Things by Wai-yee Li Pdf

Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Our relationship with things abounds with paradoxes. People assign value to objects in ways that are often deeply personal or idiosyncratic yet at the same time rooted in specific cultural and historical contexts. How do things become meaningful? How do our connections with the world of things define us? In Ming and Qing China, inquiry into things and their contradictions flourished, and its depth and complexity belie the notion that material culture simply reflects status anxiety or class conflict. Wai-yee Li traces notions of the pleasures and dangers of things in the literature and thought of late imperial China. She explores how aesthetic claims and political power intersect, probes the objective and subjective dimensions of value, and questions what determines authenticity and aesthetic appeal. Li considers core oppositions—people and things, elegance and vulgarity, real and fake, lost and found—to tease out the ambiguities of material culture. With examples spanning the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, she shows how relations with things can both encode and resist social change, political crisis, and personal loss. The Promise and Peril of Things reconsiders major works such as The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Story of the Stone, Li Yu’s writings, and Wu Weiye’s poetry and drama, as well as a host of less familiar texts. It offers new insights into Ming and Qing literary and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as the intersections of material culture with literature, intellectual history, and art history.

Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-century China

Chun-shu Chang,Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang
Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth century China Book PDF

Author : Chun-shu Chang,Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 472 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : China
ISBN : 047208528X

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Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-century China by Chun-shu Chang,Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang Pdf

Describes the social and cultural transformation of seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Li Yu

Ming

Robert B. Oxnam
Ming Book PDF

Author : Robert B. Oxnam
Publisher : St Martins Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0312113153

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Ming by Robert B. Oxnam Pdf

Meihua and Lonyan, the offspring of two prominent Chinese families, form a powerful bond in their shared troubles over repressive family expectations until they are forced onto opposing sides in a revolution against a barbaric warlord. By the author of Cinnabar.