Download or read book Feeling the Past in Seventeenth Century China written by Xiaoqiao Ling and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Feeling the Past in Seventeenth century China written by Xiaoqiao Ling and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Calls attention to the central role played by the body in capturing memories of the lived experiences of traditional Chinese writers during the tumultuous Manchu conquest of China"--
Download or read book The Search for Modern China written by Jonathan D. Spence and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1990 with total page 1054 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work chronicles the history of China for over four hundred years through the spring of 1989.
Download or read book Confucian Image Politics written by Ying Zhang and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Ming-Qing transition (roughly from the 1570s to the 1680s), literati-officials in China employed public forms of writing, art, and social spectacle to present positive moral images of themselves and negative images of their rivals. The rise of print culture, the dynastic change, and the proliferating approaches to Confucian moral cultivation together gave shape to this new political culture. Confucian Image Politics considers the moral images of officials—as fathers, sons, husbands, and friends—circulated in a variety of media inside and outside the court. It shows how power negotiations took place through participants’ invocations of Confucian ethical ideals in political attacks, self-expression, self-defense, discussion of politically sensitive issues, and literati community rebuilding after the dynastic change. This first book-length study of early modern Chinese politics from the perspective of critical men’s history shows how images—the Donglin official, the Fushe scholar, the turncoat figure—were created, circulated, and contested to serve political purposes.
Download or read book The Artful Recluse written by Peter Charles Sturman and published by Prestel Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This catalogue accompanies the exhibition The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century China, organized by Susan S. Tai in collaboration with Peter C. Sturman and presented at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, October 20, 2012-January 20, 2013, and the Asia Society, New York, March 5-June 2, 2013.
Download or read book Peony in Love written by Lisa See and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-05-04 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peony has neither seen nor spoken to any man other than her father, a wealthy Chinese nobleman. Nor has she ever ventured outside the cloistered women's quarters of the family villa. As her sixteenth birthday approaches she finds herself betrothed to a man she does not know, but Peony has dreams of her own. Her father engages a theatrical troupe to perform scenes from The Peony Pavilion, a Chinese epic opera, in their garden amidst the scent of ginger, green tea and jasmine. 'Unmarried girls should not be seen in public,' says Peony's mother, but her father allows the women to watch from behind a screen. Here, Peony catches sight of an elegant, handsome man and is immediately bewitched. So begins her unforgettable journey of love, desire, sorrow and redemption.
Download or read book Performing China written by Chi-ming Yang and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a model of economic and political strength, viewed by many as the greatest empire in the world. While the importance of China to eighteenth-century English consumer culture is well documented, less so is its influence on English values. Through a careful study of the literature, drama, philosophy, and material culture of the period, this book articulates how Chinese culture influenced English ideas about virtue. Discourses of virtue were significantly shaped by the intensified trade with the East Indies. Chi-ming Yang focuses on key forms of virtue—heroism, sincerity, piety, moderation, sensibility, and patriotism—whose meanings and social importance developed in the changing economic climate of the period. She highlights the ways in which English understandings of Eastern values transformed these morals. The book is organized by type of performance—theatrical, ethnographic, and literary—and by performances of gender, identity fraud, and religious conversion. In her analysis of these works, Yang brings to light surprising connections between figures as disparate as Confucius and a Chinese Amazon and between cultural norms as far removed as Hindu reincarnation and London coffeehouse culture. Part of a new wave of cross-disciplinary scholarship, where Chinese studies meets the British eighteenth century, this novel work will appeal to scholars in a number of fields, including performance studies, East Asian studies, British literature, cultural history, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.
Download or read book Voices from the Ming Qing Cataclysm written by Lynn A. Struve and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book presents eyewitness accounts of a turbulent period in Chinese history: the fall of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of China by the Manchus in the mid-seventeenth century. Lynn A. Struve has translated, introduced, and annotated absorbing testimonies from a wide range of individuals in different social stations--Chinese and Europeans, missionaries and viceroys, artists and merchants, Ming loyalists and Qing collaborators, maidservants and eunuchs--all telling stories of hardship and challenge in the midst of cataclysmic change. "It is a book that brings history graphically to life."--Keith Pratt, Asian Affairs "A fascinating view of the dynamics of dynastic change in China."--Jonathan Porter, History "The book combines skillful translation of a rich variety of primary sources with authoritative commentary and meticulously researched annotation."--Helen Dunstan, Historian "One of the most engaging works of scholarship to appear in the field for a long time. . . . An extraordinarily good book destined to be read and enjoyed by a very wide audience beyond the professional one."--Craig Clunas, Bulletin of SOAS "Struve is] the most knowledgeable American scholar of the history of the 'Southern Ming.' . . . This fascinating volume . . . can be readily used in any college course on late imperial Chinese history for wonderful examples of the personal experiences of the Chinese people living through the fall of the Ming dynasty to their Manchu conquerors."--Benjamin A. Elman, China Review International "The scholarship behind this work is impeccable. . . . The translations are an important contribution to the field."--Jerry Dennerline, International History Review "Throughout the volume, Struve's translations capture the different voices of the cataclysm. Students of Chinese history will find a wealth of information here."--Choice
Download or read book Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth century China written by Chun-shu Chang and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the social and cultural transformation of seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Li Yu
Download or read book China s Last Empire written by William T. Rowe and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. This original, thought-provoking history of China's last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.
Download or read book Towers in the Void written by S. E. Kile and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Writing and Materiality in China written by Judith T. Zeitlin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speaking about Chinese writing entails thinking about how writing speaks through various media. In the guises of the written character and its imprints, traces, or ruins, writing is more than textuality. The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China’s literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing. To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another. Thinking about writing as the material product of a culture shifts the emphasis from the author as the creator and ultimate arbiter of a text’s meaning to the editors, publishers, collectors, and readers through whose hands a text is reshaped, disseminated, and given new meanings. By yoking writing and materiality, the contributors to this volume aim to bypass the tendency to oppose form and content, words and things, documents and artifacts, to rethink key issues in the interpretation of Chinese literary and visual culture.
Download or read book South Asia written by Donald Frederick Lach and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Just a Song written by Stephen Owen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "“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."
Download or read book Dreaming and Self Cultivation in China 300 BCE 800 CE written by Robert Ford Campany and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience? In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE, Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and other self-cultivational disciplines. Working through a wide range of scriptures, essays, treatises, biographies, commentaries, fictive dialogues, diary records, interpretive keys, and ritual instructions, Campany uncovers a set of discrete paradigms by which dreams were viewed and responded to by practitioners. He shows how these paradigms underlay texts of diverse religious and ideological persuasions that are usually treated in mutual isolation. The result is a provocative meditation on the relationship between individuals’ nocturnal experiences and one culture’s persistent attempts to discipline, interpret, and incorporate them into waking practice.
Download or read book The Chinese Dreamscape 300 BCE 800 CE written by Robert Ford Campany and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Topsy Turvy World written by Wilt L. Idema and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
