Download or read book Literati and Self Re Presentation written by Martin Huang and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the Chinese novel in the eighteenth century, arguably one of the greatest periods of the genre, focuses on the autobiographical features of three important works: The Dream of the Red Chamber, or The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng), The Scholars (Rulin waishi), and the relatively neglected The Humble Words of an Old Rustic (Yesou puyan). The author seeks for answers to the question of why the Chinese novel was becoming increasingly autobiographical during the eighteenth century, even as explicitly autobiographical writing was in a decline. He suggests that several new trends in the development of the genre (such as the accelerated "literatization" process) and the changing status of literati contributed to the rise of this new feature of the novel. As office-holding became increasingly unavailable to many literati, new roles and new identities that allowed them to retain a claim to membership in the elite had to be found. The novel, with its ability to distance an author from himself, facilitated the exploration of alternative roles and identities. Through close readings of the three texts, the author examines various autobiographical strategies employed by the authors, among which "masking as other"—How the authorial self is re/presented as an other - stands out as the most significant. The book links the authors' obsession with masks both to an increasingly ambiguous sense of self-identity experienced by many literati and to the larger issue of literati self-representation. Throughout, the readings do not confine themselves to purely literary matters; they also analyze the three works as a complex artifact typical of literati "self" culture and situate them in the larger intellectual history of the period.

Download or read book Ideology Power Text written by Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The division between the scholar-gentry class and the “people” was an enduring theme of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic state. Twentieth-century elites recast this as a division between intellectuals and peasants and made the confrontation between the writing/intellectual self and the peasant “other” a central concern of literature. The author argues that, in the process, they created the “peasantry,” the downtrodden rural masses represented as proper objects of political action and shifting ideological agendas. Throughout this transition, language or discourse has been not only a weapon of struggle but the center of controversy and contention. Because of this primacy of language, the author’s main approach is the close reading or, rather, re-reading of significant narrative fictions from four literary generations to demonstrate how historical, ideological, and cultural issues are absorbed, articulated, and debated within the text. Three chapters each focus on one representative author. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881-1936), which initiated the literary preoccupation with the victimized peasant, is also about the identity crisis of the intellectual. Zhao Shuli (1906-1970), upheld by the Communist Party as a model “peasant writer,” tragically exemplifies in his career the inherent contradictions of such an assigned role. In the post-Mao era, Gao Xiaosheng (1928—) uses the ironic play of language to present a more ambiguous peasant while deflating intellectual pretensions. The chapter on the last of the four “generations” examines several texts by Mo Yan (1956—), Han Shaogong (1952—), and Wang Anyi (1954—) as examples of “root-searching” fiction from the mid-1980’s. While reaching back into the past, this fiction is paradoxically also experimental in technique: the encounter with the peasant leads to questions about the self-construction of the intellectual and the nature of narrative representation itself. Throughout, the focus is on texts in which some sort of representation or stand-in of the writer/intellectual self is present—as character, as witness, as center of consciousness, or as first-person or obtrusive narrator. Each story catches the writer in a self-reflective mode, the confrontation with the peasant “other” providing a theater for acting out varying dramas of identity, power, ideology, political engagement, and self-representation.

Download or read book Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice written by Roger T. Ames and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1998-04-30 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores, from a cross-cultural viewpoint and in terms of symbolic expression, the self's problematic relationship to language and art and to the culture embedding the language and art.

Download or read book When I was Born written by Jing M. Wang and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the period between the 1920s and 1940s, a genre emerged in Chinese literature that would reveal crucial contradictions in Chinese culture that still exist today. At a time of intense political conflict, Chinese women began to write autobiography, a genre that focused on personal identity and self-exploration rather than the national, collective identity that the country was championing. When "I" Was Born: Women's Autobiography in Modern China reclaims the voices of these particular writers, voices that have been misinterpreted and overlooked for decades. Tracing women writers as they move from autobiographical fiction, often self-revelatory and personal, to explicit autobiographies that focused on women's roles in public life, Jing M. Wang reveals the factors that propelled this literary movement, the roles that liberal translators and their renditions of Western life stories played, and the way in which these women writers redefined writing and gender in the stories they told. But Wang reveals another story as well: the evolving history and identity of women in modern Chinese society. When "I" Was Born adds to a growing body of important work in Chinese history and culture, women's studies, and autobiography in a global context. Writers discussed include Xie Bingying, Zhang Ailing, Yu Yinzi, Fei Pu, Lu Meiyen, Feng Heyi, Ye Qian, Bai Wei, Shi Wen, Fan Xiulin, Su Xuelin, and Lu Yin.

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 Chinese Funerary Biographies written by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2019-12-13 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tens of thousands of epitaphs, or funerary biographies, survive from imperial China. Engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased’s biography and exemplary words and deeds, expressing the survivors’ longing for the dead. These epitaphs provide glimpses of the lives of women, men who did not leave a mark politically, and children—people who are not well documented in more conventional sources such as dynastic histories and local gazetteers. This anthology of translations makes available funerary biographies covering nearly two thousand years, from the Han dynasty through the nineteenth century, selected for their value as teaching material for courses in Chinese history, literature, and women’s studies as well as world history. Because they include revealing details about personal conduct, families, local conditions, and social, cultural, and religious practices, these epitaphs illustrate ways of thinking and the realities of daily life. Most can be read and analyzed on multiple levels, and they stimulate investigation of topics such as the emotional tenor of family relations, rituals associated with death, Confucian values, women’s lives as written about by men, and the use of sources assumed to be biased. These biographies will be especially effective when combined with more readily available primary sources such as official documents, religious and intellectual discourses, and anecdotal stories, promising to generate provocative discussion of literary genre, the ways historians use sources, and how writers shape their accounts.

Download or read book Subjectivities written by Regenia Gagnier and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1991 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis of this text is that, whereas bourgeois subjectivity resembles the central and developing self of such novels as "David Copperfield", working-class subjectivity consists of an attention to working environment and community that diminishes concern with self.

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 Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice written by Maija Bell Samei and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice considers the effects on poetic voice of a conventional feminine persona, the abandoned woman, in early Chinese song lyric (ci) poems. The author reads the literary cross-dressing and ventriloquism of these mostly male-authored poems in light of the highly indeterminate Chinese poetic language, resulting in a consideration of persona and poetic voice of interest to scholars of lyric poetry in any language.

Download or read book Appropriation and Representation written by Shuhui Yang and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feng Menglong (1574–1646) was recognized as the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular literature of his time. He is known today for compiling three famous collections of vernacular short stories, each containing forty stories, collectively known as Sanyan. Appropriation and Representation adapts concepts of ventriloquism and dialogism from Bakhtin and Holquist to explore Feng’s methods of selecting source materials. Shuhui Yang develops a model of development in which Feng’s approach to selecting and working with his source materials becomes clear. More broadly, Appropriation and Representation locates Feng Menglong’s Sanyan in the cultural milieu of the late Ming, including the archaist movement in literature, literati marginality and anxieties, the subversive use of folk works, and the meiren xiangcao tradition—appropriating a female identity to express male frustration. Against this background, a rationale emerges for Feng’s choice to elevate and promote the vernacular story while stepping back form an overt authorial role.

Download or read book Friends Acquaintances Pupils and Patrons written by Anna Beerens and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation. This study of the social circumstances of Japanese intellectuals in the last quarter of the eighteenth century is based on biographical data concerning 173 individuals. It deals with the image of intellectual life of that period in current scholarship, and with the self-image and ethos of scholars, authors, poets and artists. That self-image and ethos, however, often clash with the realities of their everyday lives. This prosopographical investigation offers a new look at intellectual life on a basic level. The current image of intellectual life in the Tokugawa period is one of dissatisfaction and withdrawal, whereas the image that results from this study is one of dynamism and interaction. For more (Dutch-language) titles on Japan, please visit: "http://www.aup.nl/do.php?a=show_visitor_booklist&b=series&series=21">www.aup.nl/japan This title can be previewed in Google Books - http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9789087280017.

Download or read book Snakes Legs written by Martin W. Huang and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2004-09-30 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Snakes' Legs examines sequels (xushu), a common but long-neglected literary phenomenon in traditional China. What prompted writers to produce sequels despite their poor reputation as a genre? What motivated readers to read them? How should we characterize the nature of the relationship between sequels and rewritings? Contributors to this volume illuminate these and other questions, and the collection as a whole offers a comprehensive consideration of this vigorous genre while suggesting fascinating new directions for research. Xushu as a discursive practice reinforces the paradox that innovation is impossible without imitation. It presents us with fertile ground for studying the intricate ties that bind the writer and reader of traditional Chinese fiction: the writer of xushu is always self-consciously assuming the dual role of author and reader and in the writing process must consider both the work in progress as well as its precursor(s). Snakes' Legs contains detailed discussions of some representative xushu works from the late Ming and Qing periods, many of which have received little scholarly attention. It will shed light on the development of Chinese fiction and the various textual practices in traditional China as well as account for the genre’s continuing vitality in modern times. Contributors: Robert E. Hegel, Siao-chen Hu, Martin W. Huang, Keith McMahon, Qiancheng Li, Ying Wang, Ellen Widmer, Laura H. Wu, Shuhui Yang.

Download or read book Vision Devotion and Self Representation in Late Medieval Art written by Alexa Sand and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the 'owner portrait' in the context of late medieval devotional books primarily from France and England. These mirror-like pictures of praying book owners respond to and help develop a growing concern with visibility and self-scrutiny that characterized the religious life of the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The image of the praying book owner translated pre-existing representational strategies concerned with the authority and spiritual efficacy of pictures and books, such as the Holy Face and the donor image, into a more intimate and reflexive mode of address in Psalters and Books of Hours created for lay users. Alexa Sand demonstrates how this transformation had profound implications for devotional practices and for the performance of gender and class identity in the striving, aristocratic world of late medieval France and England.

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 Playwrights and Literary Games in Seventeenth Century China written by Jing Shen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2010-08-04 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Playwrights and Literary Games in Seventeenth-Century China: Plays by Tang Xianzu, Mei Dingzuo, Wu Bing, Li Yu, and Kong Shangren is a full-length study of chuanqi (romance) drama, a sophisticated form with substantial literary and meta-theatrical value that reigned in Chinese theater from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and nourished later theatrical traditions including jingju (Beijing Opera). Highly educated dramatists used chuanqi to present in artistic form personal, social, and political concerns of their time. There were six outstanding examples of these trends, considered masterpieces in their time and ever since. This study presents them in their social and cultural context during the long seventeenth century (1580D1700), the period of great experimentation and political transition. The romantic spirit and independent thinking of the late Ming elite stimulated the efflorescence of the chuanqi, and that legacy was inherited and investigated during the second half of the seventeenth-century in early Qing. Jing Shen examinees the texts to demonstrate that the playwrights appropriate, convert, or misinterpret other genres or literary works of enduring influence into their plays to convey subtle and subversive expressions in the fine margins between tradition and innovation, history and theatrical re-presentation. By exploring the components of romance in texts from late Ming to early Qing, Shen reveals creative readings of earlier themes, stories, plays and the changing idea of romanticism for chuanqi drama. This study also shows the engagement of literati playwrights in closed literary circles in which chuanqi plays became a tool by which literati playwrights negotiated their agency and social stature. The five playwrights whose works are analyzed in this book had different experiences pursuing government service as scholar-officials; some failed to achieve high office. But their common concerns and self-conscious literary choices reveal important insights into the culture of the seventeenth century, and into the sociopolitical implications of the chuanqi genre. In addition to classical Chinese commentaries on chuanqi drama, this book uses modern critical theories and terminology on Western drama to enhance the analysis of chuanqi plays.

Download or read book Signposts of Self Realization written by Xinmin Liu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-02-20 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Signposts of Self-Realization, Xinmin Liu offers an ontological study of education and development of the individual self through the prisms of ethical progress and social evolution in the context of modern Chinese literature and film. Did self-realization in the Chinese modern follow the law of Social Darwinism: the biggest ego always won out? Is individualism always self-regarding, never other-regarding? How did the Greater I evolve out of the Lesser I socially and ethically? Confronting these questions, the author navigates through the terrains of paraphrastic translation, Buddhist nonself, lyrical epiphany, redemptive memory and ethnic orality to map out an alternative path for the growth of a modern Chinese self.

Download or read book Betraying Our Selves written by NA NA and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a lively study of the autobiographical instinct in a variety of 16th and 17th century modes of writing in English, from letters and memoirs to pastoral, polemic and street ballads. The book's central concern is how "selves" are "betrayed" in texts, particularly in the centuries before the autobiography was a recognized genre. It suggests that self-representation in the early modern period was often indirect, emerging in oblique and surprising ways.