Download or read book Geo Narratives of a Filial Son written by Elizabeth Kindall and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Huang Xiangjian, a mid-seventeenth-century member of the Suzhou local elite, journeyed on foot to southwest China and recorded its sublime scenery in site-specific paintings. Elizabeth Kindall’s innovative analysis of the visual experiences and social functions Huang conveyed through his oeuvre reveals an unrecognized tradition of site paintings, here labeled geo-narratives, that recount specific journeys and create meaning in the paintings. Kindall shows how Huang created these geo-narratives by drawing upon the Suzhou place-painting tradition, as well as the encoded experiences of southwestern sites discussed in historical gazetteers and personal travel records, and the geography of the sites themselves. Ultimately these works were intended to create personas and fulfill specific social purposes among the educated class during the Ming-Qing transition. Some of Huang’s paintings of the southwest, together with his travel records, became part of a campaign to attain the socially generated title of Filial Son, whereas others served private functions. This definitive study elucidates the context for Huang Xiangjian’s painting and identifies geo-narrative as a distinct landscape-painting tradition lauded for its naturalistic immediacy, experiential topography, and dramatic narratives of moral persuasion, class identification, and biographical commemoration.
Download or read book Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China written by Cong Ellen Zhang and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Educated men in Song-dynasty China (960–1279) traveled frequently in search of scholarly and bureaucratic success. These extensive periods of physical mobility took them away from their families, homes, and native places for long periods of time, preventing them from fulfilling their most sacred domestic duty: filial piety to their parents. In this deeply grounded work, Cong Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than two thousand funerary biographies and other official and private writing, Zhang argues that the predicament in which Song literati found themselves diminished neither the importance of filial piety nor the appeal of participating in examinations and government service. On the contrary, the Northern Song witnessed unprecedented literati activity and state involvement in the bolstering of ancient forms of filial performances and the promotion of new ones. The result was the triumph of a new filial ideal: luyang. By labeling highly coveted honors and privileges attainable solely through scholarly and official accomplishments as the most celebrated filial acts, the luyang rhetoric elevated office-holding men to be the most filial of sons. Consequently, the proper performance of filiality became essential to scholar-official identity and self-representation. Zhang convincingly demonstrates that this reconfiguration of elite male filiality transformed filial piety into a status- and gender-based virtue, a change that had wide implications for elite family life and relationships in the Northern Song. The separation of elite men from their parents and homes also made the idea of “native place” increasingly fluid. This development in turn generated an interest in family preservation as filial performance. Individually initiated, kinship- and native place-based projects flourished and coalesced with the moral and cultural visions of leading scholar-intellectuals, providing the social and familial foundations for the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism as well as new cultural norms that transformed Chinese society in the Song and beyond.
Download or read book Reading for the Moral written by Maria Franca Sibau and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reassesses didacticism in seventeenth-century Chinese vernacular fiction and challenges the view that the late Ming was a notoriously immoral time. Reading for the Moral offers an innovative reassessment of the nature of moral representation and exemplarity in Chinese vernacular fiction. Maria Franca Sibau focuses on two little-studied story collections published at the end of the Ming dynasty, Exemplary Words for the World (Xingshi yan, 1632) and Bell in the Still Night (Qingye zhong, c. 1645). Far from being tediously moralistic tales, these stories of loyal ministers, filial children, chaste widows, and selfless friends provide a deeper understanding of the five cardinal relationships central to Confucian ethics. They explore the inherent tension between what we might call textbook morality, on the one hand, and untidy everyday life, on the other. The stories often take a critical view of mechanical notions of retribution, countering it with the logic of virtue as its own reward. Conflict between passion and duty is typically resolved in favor of duty, a duty redefined with a palpable sense of urgency. In constructing vernacular representations of moral exemplars from the recent historical past rather than from remote or fictitious antiquity, the story compilers show how these virtues are not abstract or monolithic norms, but play out within the contingencies of time and space. Reading for the Moral is an entertaining and insightful exploration of how seriously moralistic writers really were in a time that became notorious for its supposed immorality. Sibaus encyclopedic knowledge of both original texts and relevant secondary literature make this an excellent source of inspiration for further research. This book is an outstanding accomplishment. Robert E. Hegel, author of Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China
Download or read book Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting written by Juliane Noth and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-11-20 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese ink painters of the Republican period (1911–1949) creatively engaged with a range of art forms in addition to ink, such as oil painting, drawing, photography, and woodblock prints. They transformed their medium of choice in innovative ways, reinterpreting both its history and its theoretical foundations. Juliane Noth offers a new understanding of these compelling experiments in Chinese painting by studying them as transmedial practice, at once shaped by and integral to the modern global art world. Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting shines a spotlight on the mid-1930s, a period of intense productivity in which Chinese artists created an enormous number of artworks and theoretical texts. The book focuses on the works of three seminal artists, Huang Binhong, He Tianjian, and Yu Jianhua, facilitating fresh insights into this formative stage of their careers and into their collaborations in artworks and publications. In a nuanced reading of paintings, photographs, and literary and theoretical texts, Noth shows how artworks and discussions about the future of ink painting were intimately linked to the reshaping of the country through infrastructure development and tourism, thus leading to the creation of a uniquely modern Chinese landscape imagery.
Download or read book Orthodox Passions written by Maram Epstein and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Maram Epstein identifies filial piety as the dominant expression of love in Qing dynasty texts. At a time when Manchu regulations made chastity the primary metaphor for obedience and social duty, filial discourse increasingly embraced the dramatic and passionate excesses associated with late-Ming chastity narratives. Qing texts, especially those from the Jiangnan region, celebrate modes of filial piety that conflicted with the interests of the patriarchal family and the state. Analyzing filial narratives from a wide range of primary texts, including local gazetteers, autobiographical and biographical nianpu records, and fiction, Epstein shows the diversity of acts constituting exemplary filial piety. This context, Orthodox Passions argues, enables a radical rereading of the great novel of manners The Story of the Stone (ca. 1760), whose absence of filial affections and themes make it an outlier in the eighteenth-century sentimental landscape. By decentering romantic feeling as the dominant expression of love during the High Qing, Orthodox Passions calls for a new understanding of the affective landscape of late imperial China.
Download or read book Representing Lives in China written by Ihor Pidhainy and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters in this ground-breaking volume examine the complex practices of biographical writing in Ming and Qing China. The authors draw on a rich variety of sources to answer some basic questions: Who were the writers of these texts and the subjects of their biographical constructions? What motivated these textual productions and sustained the routes from (re)creations to (re)publications? The informed and fascinating readings illuminate the enduring appeal of representing and represented lives in Chinese history.
Download or read book Keywords in Chinese Culture written by Li Wai-yee and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like every major culture, Chinese has its set of keywords: pivotal terms of political, ethical, literary and philosophical discourse. Tracing the origins, development, polysemy, and usages of keywords is one of the best ways to chart cultural and historical changes. This volume analyzes some of these keywords from different disciplinary and temporal perspectives, offering a new integrative study of their semantic richness, development trajectory, and distinct usages in Chinese culture. The authors of the volume explore different keywords and focus on different periods and genres, ranging from philosophical and historical texts of the Warring States period (453-V221 BCE) to late imperial (ca. 6th?V18th centuries CE) literature and philosophy. They are guided by a similar set of questions: What elevates a mere word to the status of keyword? What sort of resonance and reverberations do we expect a keyword to have? How much does the semantic range of a keyword explain its significance? What kinds of arguments does it generate? What are the stories told to illustrate its meanings? What are political and intellectual implications of the keyword's reevaluation? What does it mean to translate a keyword and map its meaning against other languages? Throughout Chinese history, new ideas and new approaches often mean reinterpreting important words; rupture, continuities, and inflection points are inseparable from the linguistic history of specific terms. The premise of this book is that taking the long view and encompassing different disciplines yield new insights and unexpected connections. The authors, who come from the fields of history,
Download or read book The Formation of Regional Religious Systems in Greater China written by Jiang Wu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of Spatial Humanities has spurred a digital revolution in the field of Chinese studies, especially in the study of religion. Based on years of data compilation and analysis of religious sites, this book explores the formation of Regional Religious Systems (RRS) in Greater China in unprecedented scope and depth. It addresses quantitatively the enduring historical and contemporary issues of China’s deep-rooted regionalism and spatially variegated cultural and religious landscape. A range of topics are explored: theoretical discussions of the concept of RRS; case studies of regional and local religious institutions; the formation of local cults and pilgrimage network; and the spread of religious networks to overseas Chinese communities and the Bon religion in Tibet. The book also considers long-standing challenges of researching with spatial data for humanities and social science research, such as data collection, integration, spatial analysis, and map creation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Chinese Studies, Digital Humanities, Human Geography and Sociology.
Download or read book The Aura of Confucius written by Julia K. Murray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-25 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study highlights the importance of images within Confucianism and to a shrine-tomb for Confucius's buried robe and cap.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Travel Writing written by Nandini Das and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together original contributions from scholars across the world, this volume traces the history of travel writing from antiquity to the Internet age. It examines travel texts of several national or linguistic traditions, introducing readers to the global contexts of the genre. From wilderness to the urban, from Nigeria to the polar regions, from mountains to rivers and the desert, this book explores some of the key places and physical features represented in travel writing. Chapters also consider the employment in travel writing of the diary, the letter, visual images, maps and poetry, as well as the relationship of travel writing to fiction, science, translation and tourism. Gender-based and ecocritical approaches are among those surveyed. Together, the thirty-seven chapters here underline the richness and complexity of this genre.
Download or read book Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World written by Stephen H. Whiteman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Courts and societies across the early modern Eurasian world were fundamentally transformed by the physical, technological, and conceptual developments of their era. Evolving forms of communication, greatly expanded mobility, the spread of scientific knowledge, and the emergence of an increasingly integrated global economy all affected how states articulated and projected visions of authority into societies that, in turn, perceived and responded to these visions in often contrasting terms. Landscape both reflected and served as a vehicle for these transformations, as the relationship between the land and its imagination and consumption became a fruitful site for the negotiation of imperial identities within and beyond the precincts of the court. In Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World, contributors explore the role of landscape in the articulation and expression of imperial identity and the mediation of relationships between the court and its many audiences in the early modern world. Nine studies focused on the geographical areas of East and South Asia, the Islamic world, and Europe illuminate how early modern courts and societies shaped, and were shaped by, the landscape, including both physical sites, such as gardens, palaces, cities, and hunting parks, and conceptual ones, such as those of frontiers, idealized polities, and the cosmos. The collected essays expand the meaning and potential of landscape as a communicative medium in this period by putting an array of forms and subjects in dialogue with one another, including not only unique expressions, such as gardens, paintings, and manuscripts, but also the products of rapidly developing commercial technologies of reproduction, especially print. The volume invites a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the complexity with which early modern states constructed and deployed different modes of landscape for different audiences and environments. Contributors: Robert Batchelor, Seyed Mohammad Ali Emrani, John Finlay, Caroline Fowler, Katrina Grant, Finola O'Kane, Anton Schweizer, Larry Silver, Stephen H. Whiteman.
Download or read book Printing Landmarks written by Robert Goree and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Printing Landmarks tells the story of the late Tokugawa period’s most distinctive form of popular geography: meisho zue. Beginning with the publication of Miyako meisho zue in 1780, these monumental books deployed lovingly detailed illustrations and informative prose to showcase famous places (meisho) in ways that transcended the limited scope, quality, and reliability of earlier guidebooks and gazetteers. Putting into spellbinding print countless landmarks of cultural significance, the makers of meisho zue created an opportunity for readers to experience places located all over the Japanese archipelago. In this groundbreaking multidisciplinary study, Robert Goree draws on diverse archival and scholarly sources to explore why meisho zue enjoyed widespread and enduring popularity. Examining their readership, compilation practices, illustration techniques, cartographic properties, ideological import, and production networks, Goree finds that the appeal of the books, far from accidental, resulted from specific choices editors and illustrators made about form, content, and process. Spanning the fields of book history, travel literature, map history, and visual culture, Printing Landmarks provides a new perspective on Tokugawa-period culture by showing how meisho zue depicted inspiring geographies in which social harmony, economic prosperity, and natural stability made for a peaceful polity.
Download or read book Staging Personhood written by Guojun Wang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After toppling the Ming dynasty, the Qing conquerors forced Han Chinese males to adopt Manchu hairstyle and clothing. Yet China’s new rulers tolerated the use of traditional Chinese attire in performances, making theater one of the only areas of life where Han garments could still be seen and where Manchu rule could be contested. Staging Personhood uncovers a hidden history of the Ming–Qing transition by exploring what it meant for the clothing of a deposed dynasty to survive onstage. Reading dramatic works against Qing sartorial regulations, Guojun Wang offers an interdisciplinary lens on the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule in seventeenth-century China. He reveals not just how political and ethnic conflicts shaped theatrical costuming but also the ways costuming enabled different modes of identity negotiation during the dynastic transition. In case studies of theatrical texts and performances, Wang considers clothing and costumes as indices of changing ethnic and gender identities. He contends that theatrical costuming provided a productive way to reconnect bodies, clothes, and identities disrupted by political turmoil. Through careful attention to a variety of canonical and lesser-known plays, visual and performance records, and historical documents, Staging Personhood provides a pathbreaking perspective on the cultural dynamics of early Qing China.
Download or read book Carving Status at K mgangsan written by Maya K. H. Stiller and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Korea’s Kŭmgangsan is one of Asia’s most celebrated sacred mountain ranges, comparable in fame to Mount Tai in China and Mount Fuji in Japan. Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan marks a paradigm shift in the research about East Asian mountains by introducing an entirely new field: autographic rock graffiti. The book details how late Chosŏn (ca. 1600–1900 CE) Korean elite travelers used Kŭmgangsan to demonstrate their high social status by carving inscriptions, naming sites, and joining the literary pedigree of visitors to renowned locales. Such travel practices show how social competition emerged in the spatial context of a landscape. Hence, Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan argues for an expansion of accepted historical narratives on travel and mountain space in premodern East Asia. Rather than interpreting pilgrimage routes as exclusively religious or tourist, in Kŭmgangsan’s case they were also an important site of collective memory. Embarking on a journey to Kŭmgangsan to view and contribute to its sites of memory was an endeavor that late Chosŏn Koreans hoped to achieve in their lives. Based on multidisciplinary research drawing on literary writings, court records, gazetteers, maps, songs, calligraphy, and paintings, Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan is the first historical study of this practice. It will appeal to scholars in fields ranging from East Asian history, literature, and geography, to pilgrimage studies and art history.
Download or read book Where Dragon Veins Meet written by Stephen H. Whiteman and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2020-01-09 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde, Hebei) to support his annual tours north among the court’s Inner Mongolian allies. The Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Bishu Shanzhuang) was strategically located at the node of mountain “veins” through which the Qing empire’s geomantic energy was said to flow. At this site, from late spring through early autumn, the Kangxi emperor presided over rituals of intimacy and exchange that celebrated his rule: garden tours, banquets, entertainments, and gift giving. Stephen Whiteman draws on resources and methods from art and architectural history, garden and landscape history, early modern global history, and historical geography to reconstruct the Mountain Estate as it evolved under Kangxi, illustrating the importance of landscape as a medium for ideological expression during the early Qing and in the early modern world more broadly. Examination of paintings, prints, historical maps, newly created maps informed by GIS-based research, and personal accounts reveals the significance of geographic space and its representation in the negotiation of Qing imperial ideology. The first monograph in any language to focus solely on the art and architecture of the Kangxi court, Where Dragon Veins Meet illuminates the court’s production and deployment of landscape as a reflection of contemporary concerns and offers new insight into the sources and forms of Qing power through material expressions. Art History Publication Initiative
Download or read book The Ancient State of Puy in Northeast Asia written by Mark E. Byington and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark E. Byington explores the formation, history, and legacy of the ancient state of Puyŏ, which existed in central Manchuria from the third century BCE until the late fifth century CE. As the earliest archaeologically attested state to arise in northeastern Asia, Puyŏ occupies an important place in the history of that region. Nevertheless, until now its history and culture have been rarely touched upon in scholarly works in any language. The present volume, utilizing recently discovered archaeological materials from Northeast China as well as a wide variety of historical records, explores the social and political processes associated with the formation and development of the Puyŏ state, and discusses how the historical legacy of Puyŏ—its historical memory—contributed to modes of statecraft of later northeast Asian states and provided a basis for a developing historiographical tradition on the Korean peninsula. Byington focuses on two major aspects of state formation: as a social process leading to the formation of a state-level polity called Puyŏ, and as a political process associated with a variety of devices intended to assure the stability and perpetuation of the inegalitarian social structures of several early states in the Korea–Manchuria region.
Download or read book Assembling Shinto written by Anna Andreeva and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "During the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries, several precursors of what is now commonly known as Shinto came together for the first time. By focusing on Mt. Miwa in present-day Nara Prefecture and examining the worship of indigenous deities (kami) that emerged in its proximity, this book serves as a case study of the key stages of “assemblage” through which this formative process took shape. Previously unknown rituals, texts, and icons featuring kami, all of which were invented in medieval Japan under the strong influence of esoteric Buddhism, are evaluated using evidence from local and translocal ritual and pilgrimage networks, changing land ownership patterns, and a range of religious ideas and practices. These stages illuminate the medieval pedigree of Ryōbu Shintō (kami ritual worship based loosely on esoteric Buddhism’s Two Mandalas), a major precursor to modern Shinto. In analyzing the key mechanisms for “assembling” medieval forms of kami worship, Andreeva challenges the twentieth-century master narrative of Shinto as an unbroken, monolithic tradition. By studying how and why groups of religious practitioners affiliated with different cultic sites and religious institutions responded to esoteric Buddhism’s teachings, this book demonstrates that kami worship in medieval Japan was a result of complex negotiations."
