Download or read book Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China written by Martin W. Huang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this new study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire. He further suggests that the rise of vernacular fiction during the late Ming dynasty should be studied in the context of contemporary debates on desire, along with the new and complex views that emerged from those debates.Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China shows that the obsession of authors with individual desire is an essential quality that defines traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre. Thus the maturation of the genre can best be appreciated in terms of its increasingly sophisticated exploration of the phenomenon of desire."
Download or read book Transmutations of Desire written by Qiancheng Li and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the West, love occupies center stage in the modern age, whether in art, intellectual life, or the economic life. We may observe a similar development in China, on its own impetus, which has resulted in this characteristic of modernity--this feature of modern life has been securely and unambiguously established, not the least facilitated by the thriving of literature about qing, whether in traditional or modern forms. Qiancheng Li concentrates on the nuances of a similar trend manifested in the Chinese context. The emphasis is on critical readings of the texts that have shaped this trend, including important Ming- and Qing-dynasty works of drama, Buddhist texts and other religious/philosophical works, in all their subtlety and evocative power. "The power of qing or strong emotion is a major theme in late imperial Chinese literature--some writers asserting that it can transcend even life itself. Qiancheng Li surveys a number of seventeenth-century philosophical, religious, and literary texts to elucidate the metaphysical aspects of emotional attachment and of sexual desire in particular. Through his broad and penetrating reading, Li demonstrates incontrovertibly how, to seventeenth-century writers, qing and religion were inextricably linked. To those writers, qing could bring enlightenment, and certainly Li’s study enlightens its readers to new levels of complexity in major literary works of that period. Transmutations of Desire sets a major new milestone in the study of traditional Chinese culture."--Robert E. Hegel, Washington University in St. Louis
Download or read book Wanton Women in Late Imperial Chinese Literature written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature, the essay contributors explore how from the late Ming onward images of sexually transgressive women developed across a range of genres as women and men addressed tensions between past ideals and lived worlds.
Download or read book Male Friendship in Ming China written by Martin W. Huang and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first interdisciplinary effort to study friendship in late imperial China from the perspective of gender history. Friendship was valorized with unprecedented enthusiasm in Ming China (1368-1644). Some Ming literati even proposed that friendship was the most fundamental relationship among the so-called "five cardinal human relationships". Why the cult of friendship in Ming China? How was male friendship theorized, practiced and represented during that period? These are some of the questions the current volume deals with. Coming from different disciplines (history, musicology and literary studies), the contributors thoroughly explore the complexities and the gendered nature of friendship in Ming China. This volume has also been published as a special theme issue of Brill's journal NAN NÜ, Men, Women and Gender in China.
Download or read book Women S Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth Century China written by Li Guo and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Women's Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Modern China, Li Guo presents the first book-length study in English of women's tanci fiction, the distinctive Chinese form of narrative written in rhymed lines during the late imperial to early modern period (related to, but different from, the orally performed version also called tanci). She explores the tradition through a comparative analysis of five seminal texts. Guo argues that Chinese women writers of the period position the personal within the diegesis in order to reconfigure their moral commitments and personal desires. By fashioning a "feminine" representation of subjectivity, tanci writers found a habitable space of self-expression in the male-dominated literary tradition.Through her discussion of the emergence, evolution, and impact of women's tanci, Guo shows how historical forces acting on the formation of the genre serve as the background for an investigation of cross-dressing, self-portraiture, and authorial self-representation. Further, Guo approaches anew the concept of "woman-oriented perspective" and argues that this perspective conceptualizes a narrative framework in which the heroine (s) are endowed with mobility to exercise their talent and power as social beings as men's equals. Such a woman-oriented perspective redefines normalized gender roles with an eye to exposing women's potentialities to transform historical and social customs in order to engender a world with better prospects for women."This work will be a significant contribution to scholarship. Chinese women's tanci novels in late imperial Qing and early twentieth-century China are numerous in collections; however, their scholarly studies are still insufficient. This book covers some understudied tanci texts and sheds new insights in the studied area. It also brings in association study with other Chinese writing genres during the late Qing period, as well as comparative perspective within the world culture when possible." Qingyun Wu, California State University, Los Angeles
Download or read book Competing Discourses written by Maram Epstein and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the traditional Chinese symbolic vocabulary, the construction of gender was never far from debates about ritual propriety, desire, and even cosmic harmony. Competing Discourses maps the aesthetic and semantic meanings associated with gender in the Ming–Qing vernacular novel through close readings of five long narratives: Marriage Bonds to Awaken the World, Dream of the Red Chamber, A Country Codger’s Words of Exposure, Flowers in the Mirror, and A Tale of Heroic Lovers. Maram Epstein argues that the authors of these novels manipulated gendered terms to achieve structural coherence. These patterns are, however, frequently at odds with other gendered structures in the texts, and authors exploited these conflicts to discuss the problem of orthodox behavior versus the cult of feeling."
Download or read book Writing Women in Late Imperial China written by Ellen Widmer and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars from the fields of literature, history, and art history apply a range of methodologies to newly discovered works by women writers and to other sources concerning women writers in China from 1600 to 1900.
Download or read book Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China written by Martin W. Huang and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did traditional Chinese literati so often identify themselves with women in their writing? What can this tell us about how they viewed themselves as men and how they understood masculinity? How did their attitudes in turn shape the martial heroes and other masculine models they constructed? Martin Huang attempts to answer these questions in this valuable work on manhood in late imperial China. He focuses on the ambivalent and often paradoxical role played by women and the feminine in the intricate negotiating process of male gender identity in late imperial cultural discourses. Two common strategies for constructing and negotiating masculinity were adopted in many of the works examined here. The first, what Huang calls the strategy of analogy, constructs masculinity in close association with the feminine; the second, the strategy of differentiation, defines it in sharp contrast to the feminine. In both cases women bear the burden as the defining "other." In this study, "feminine" is a rather broad concept denoting a wide range of gender phenomena associated with women, from the politically and socially destabilizing to the exemplary wives and daughters celebrated in Confucian chastity discourse.
Download or read book Rulin waishi and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China written by Shang Wei and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rulin waishi (The Unofficial History of the Scholars) is more than a landmark in the history of the Chinese novel. This eighteenth-century work, which was deeply embedded in the intellectual and literary discourses of its time, challenges the reader to come to grips with the mid-Qing debates over ritual and ritualism, and the construction of history, narrative, and lyricism. Wu Jingzi’s (1701–54) ironic portrait of literati life was unprecedented in its comprehensive treatment of the degeneration of mores, the predicaments of official institutions, and the Confucian elite’s futile struggle to reassert moral and cultural authority. Like many of his fellow literati, Wu found the vernacular novel an expressive and malleable medium for discussing elite concerns. Through a close reading of Rulin waishi, Shang Wei seeks to answer such questions as What accounts for the literati’s enthusiasm for writing and reading novels? Does this enthusiasm bespeak a conscious effort to develop a community of critical discourse outside the official world? Why did literati authors eschew publication? What are the bases for their social and cultural criticisms? How far do their criticisms go, given the authors’ alleged Confucianism? And if literati authors were interested solely in recovering moral and cultural hegemony for their class, how can we explain the irony found in their works?
Download or read book Intimate Memory written by Martin W. Huang and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sheds new light on pre-modern Chinese gender relationships in the context of marriage, male Confucian literati self-presentation, and social networks. In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memoirs, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies. Martin W. Huang is Professor of Chinese at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China.
Download or read book Love and Women in Early Chinese Fiction written by Daniel Hsieh and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2009-03-02 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In traditional China, upper-class literati were inevitably strongly influenced by Confucian doctrine and rarely touched upon such topics as love and women in their writings. It was not until the mid-Tang, a generation or two after the An Lushan rebellion, that literary circles began to engage in overt discussion of the issues of love and women, through the use of the newly emerging genres of zhiguai and chuanqi fiction. The debate was carried out with an unprecedented enthusiasm, since the topics were considered to be the key to understanding the crisis in Chinese civilization. This book examines the repertoire of chuanqi and zhiguai written during the Six Dynasties and Tang periods and analyzes the key themes, topics, and approaches found in these tales, which range from expressions of male fantasy, sympathy, fear, and anxiety, to philosophical debate on the place of the feminine in patriarchal Chinese society. Many of these stories reflect tensions between masculine and feminine aspects of civilization as seen, for example, in the conflict of male aspiration and female desire, as well as the ultimate longing for reconciliation of these divisions. These stories form a crucial chapter in the history of love in China and would provide much of the foundation for further explorations during the late imperial period, as seen in seminal works such as The Peony Pavilion and Dream of the Red Chamber.
Download or read book Collecting the Self written by Sing-chen Lydia Chiang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese strange tale collections contain short stories about ghosts and animal spirits, supra-human heroes and freaks, exotic lands and haunted homes, earthquake and floods, and other perceived “anomalies” to accepted cosmic and social norms. As such, this body of literature is a rich repository of Chinese myths, folklore, and unofficial “histories”. These collections also reflect Chinese attitudes towards normalcy and strangeness, perceptions of civilization and barbarism, and fantasies about self and other. Inspired in part by Freud’s theory of the uncanny, this book explores the emotive subtexts of late imperial strange tale collections to consider what these stories tell us about suppressed cultural anxieties, the construction of gender, and authorial self-identity.
Download or read book Fictions of Enlightenment written by Qiancheng Li and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-12-31 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictions of Enlightenment is the first book to examine the fascinating and intricate relationship between Buddhism and the development of Chinese vernacular fiction. Qiancheng Li brings Buddhist models to bear on the vision, structure, and narrative form of three classics of late imperial literature—Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and Dream of the Red Chamber—arguing that by fashioning their plots after the narratives of certain Mahāyāna sutras, the novelists transformed Buddhist concepts into narrative structures. Within the traditional Chinese novel Li even defines a new genre: the fiction of enlightenment.
Download or read book Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China written by Cuncun Wu and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Sexuality in China written by Howard Chiang and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was sex like in China, from imperial times through the post-Mao era? The answer depends, of course, on who was having sex, where they were located in time and place, and what kind of familial, social, and political structures they participated in. This collection offers a variety of perspectives by addressing diverse topics such as polygamy, pornography, free love, eugenics, sexology, crimes of passion, homosexuality, intersexuality, transsexuality, masculine anxiety, sex work, and HIV/AIDS. Following a loose chronological sequence, the chapters examine revealing historical moments in which human desire and power dynamics came into play. Collectively, the contributors undertake a necessary historiographic intervention by reconsidering Western categorizations and exploring Chinese understandings of sexuality and erotic orientation.
Download or read book Disgraceful Matters written by Janet Theiss and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-01-10 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking beyond the familiar trappings of the cult of female chastity—such as hagiographies of widows and chastity shrines--in late imperial China, this book explores the cult's political significance and practical ramifications in everyday life during the eighteenth century. In the first full-length study of the subject, Janet Theiss examines a vast number of laws, legal cases, regulations, and policies to illustrate the social and political processes through which female virtue was defined, enforced, and contested. Along the way, she provides rich details of social life and cultural practices among ordinary Chinese people through narratives of criminal cases of sexual assault, harassment, adultery, and domestic violence.
Download or read book Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm written by Kai-wing Chow and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008-04-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When did China make the decisive turn from tradition to modernity? For decades, the received wisdom would have pointed to the May Fourth movement, with its titanic battles between the champions of iconoclasm and the traditionalists, and its shift to more populist forms of politics. A growing body of recent research has, however, called into question how decisive the turn was, when it happened, and what relation the resulting modernity bore to the agendas of people who might have considered themselves representatives of such an iconoclastic movement. Having thus explicitly or implicitly 'decentered' the May Fourth, such research (augmented by contributions in the present volume) leaves us with the task of accounting for the shape Chinese modernity took, as the product of dialogues and debates between, and the interplay of, a variety of actors and trends, both within and (certainly no less importantly) without the May Fourth camp.
