Download or read book Becoming Guanyin written by Yuhang Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2024 Geiss-Hsu Book Prize for Best First Book, Society for Ming Studies The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system. Attending to the fabrication and use of “women’s things” by secular women, Li offers new insight into the relationships between worshipped and worshipper in Buddhist practice. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies, Becoming Guanyin is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay between material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.

Download or read book The Promise and Peril of Things written by Wai-yee Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Understanding Authenticity in Chinese Cultural Heritage written by Anke Hein and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Authenticity in Chinese Cultural Heritage explores the construction of "authenticity" and its consequences in relation to Chinese cultural heritage—those objects, texts, and intangible practices concerned with China’s past. Including contributions from scholars around the world reflecting on a range of different materials and time periods, Understanding Authenticity emphasizes the situatedness and fluidity of authenticity concepts. Attitudes toward authenticity change over time and place, and vary between communities and object types, among stakeholders in China as they do elsewhere. The book examines how "authenticity" relates to four major aspects of cultural heritage in China—art and material culture; cultural heritage management and preservation; living and intangible heritage; and texts and manuscripts—with individual contributions engaging in a critical and interdisciplinary conversation that weaves together heritage management, art history, archaeology, architecture, tourism, law, history, and literature. Moving beyond conceptual issues, the book also considers the practical ramifications for work in cultural heritage management, museums, and academic research. Understanding Authenticity in Chinese Cultural Heritage provides an opportunity for reflection on the contingencies of authenticity debates - not only in relation to China, but also anywhere around the world. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in a variety of fields, including heritage studies, Asian studies, art history, museum studies, history, and archaeology.

Download or read book A History of Chinese Literature written by Herbert Allen Giles and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Shi King the Old Poetry Classic of the Chinese written by William Jennings and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Luxury Arts of the Renaissance written by Marina Belozerskaya and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.

Download or read book Inscribed Landscapes written by Richard E. Strassberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-09-20 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alongside the scores of travel books about China written by foreign visitors, Chinese travelers' impressions of their own country rarely appear in translation. This anthology is the only comprehensive collection in English of Chinese travel writing from the first century A.D. through the nineteenth. Early examples of the genre describe sites important for their geography, history, and role in cultural mythology, but by the T'ang dynasty in the mid-eighth century certain historiographical and poetic discourses converged to form the "travel account" (yu-chi) and later the "travel diary" (jih-chi) as vehicles of personal expression and autobiography. These first-person narratives provide rich material for understanding the attitudes of Chinese literati toward place, nature, politics, and the self. The anthology is abundantly illustrated with paintings, portraits, maps, and drawings. Each selection is meticulously translated, carefully annotated, and prefaced by a brief description of the writer's life and work. The entire collection is introduced by an in-depth survey of the rise of Chinese travel writing as a cultural phenomenon. Inscribed Landscapes provides a unique resource for travelers as well as for scholars of Chinese literature, art, and history.

Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Download or read book Eminent Nuns written by Beata Grant and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-07-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventeenth century is generally acknowledged as one of the most politically tumultuous but culturally creative periods of late imperial Chinese history. Scholars have noted the profound effect on, and literary responses to, the fall of the Ming on the male literati elite. Also of great interest is the remarkable emergence beginning in the late Ming of educated women as readers and, more importantly, writers. Only recently beginning to be explored, however, are such seventeenth-century religious phenomena as "the reinvention" of Chan Buddhism—a concerted effort to revive what were believed to be the traditional teachings, texts, and practices of "classical" Chan. And, until now, the role played by women in these religious developments has hardly been noted at all. Eminent Nuns is an innovative interdisciplinary work that brings together several of these important seventeenth-century trends. Although Buddhist nuns have been a continuous presence in Chinese culture since early medieval times and the subject of numerous scholarly studies, this book is one of the first not only to provide a detailed view of their activities at one particular moment in time, but also to be based largely on the writings and self-representations of Buddhist nuns themselves. This perspective is made possible by the preservation of collections of "discourse records" (yulu) of seven officially designated female Chan masters in a seventeenth-century printing of the Chinese Buddhist Canon rarely used in English-language scholarship. The collections contain records of religious sermons and exchanges, letters, prose pieces, and poems, as well as biographical and autobiographical accounts of various kinds. Supplemental sources by Chan monks and male literati from the same region and period make a detailed re-creation of the lives of these eminent nuns possible. Beata Grant brings to her study background in Chinese literature, Chinese Buddhism, and Chinese women’s studies. She is able to place the seven women, all of whom were active in Jiangnan, in their historical, religious, and cultural contexts, while allowing them, through her skillful translations, to speak in their own voices. Together these women offer an important, but until now virtually unexplored, perspective on seventeenth-century China, the history of female monasticism in China, and the contributionof Buddhist nuns to the history of Chinese women’s writing.

Download or read book One of Ours written by Willa Cather and published by IndyPublish.com. This book was released on 1922 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claude has an intuitive faith in something splendid and feels at odds with his contemporaries. The war offers him the opportunity to forget his farm and his marriage of compromise; he enlists and discovers that he has lacked. But while war demands altruism, its essence is destructive

Download or read book The Civilization of China written by Herbert Allen Giles and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture written by John Kieschnick and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-06 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhism had a profound effect not only on Chinese philosophy and ritual, but also on the material culture of China. Examining the impact of books, bridges, sugar, tea and the chair, amongst other things, this text looks at how attitudes to such novelties affected the history of Chinese Buddhism.

Download or read book Jan Brueghel the Elder written by Arianne Faber Kolb and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kolb has produced a thoroughly researched essay on this painting, which is in the Getty Museum. The study focuses on Brueghel's depiction of nature, especially his exacting representation of identifiable species of animals and birds, the names of which are listed. Brueghel's collaboration with other painters, his and other painters' re-use of the same theme and composition, and the history and practice of natural history collection and representation are central themes. The volume, which is printed in a horizontal format (it's 11x8") and heavily illustrated, is written for a general audience, though art historians will also find much of interest.

Download or read book The Nestorian Monument in China written by P. Yoshio Saeki and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Sumerians written by Samuel Noah Kramer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-09-17 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A readable and up-to-date introduction to a most fascinating culture” from a world-renowned Sumerian scholar (American Journal of Archaeology). The Sumerians, the pragmatic and gifted people who preceded the Semites in the land first known as Sumer and later as Babylonia, created what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man, spanning the fifth to the second millenniums B.C. This book is an unparalleled compendium of what is known about them. Professor Kramer communicates his enthusiasm for his subject as he outlines the history of the Sumerian civilization and describes their cities, religion, literature, education, scientific achievements, social structure, and psychology. Finally, he considers the legacy of Sumer to the ancient and modern world. “An uncontested authority on the civilization of Sumer, Professor Kramer writes with grace and urbanity.” —Library Journal

Download or read book Writing Beyond Pen and Parchment written by Ricarda Wagner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can stories of magical engraved rings or prophetic inscriptions on walls tell us about how writing was perceived before print transformed the world? Writing beyond Pen and Parchment introduces readers to a Middle Ages where writing is not confined to manuscripts but is inscribed in the broader material world, in textiles and tombs, on weapons or human skin. Drawing on the work done at the Collaborative Research Centre “Material Text Cultures,” (SFB 933) this volume presents a comparative overview of how and where text-bearing artefacts appear in medieval German, Old Norse, British, French, Italian and Iberian literary traditions, and also traces the paths inscribed objects chart across multiple linguistic and cultural traditions. The volume’s focus on the raw materials and practices that shaped artefacts both mundane or fantastical in medieval narratives offers a fresh perspective on the medieval world that takes seriously the vibrancy of matter as a vital aspect of textual culture often overlooked.

Download or read book China and the Chinese written by Herbert Allen Giles and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: