Download or read book Literati Storytelling in Late Medieval China written by Manling Luo and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-02-02 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholar-officials of late medieval China were not only enthusiastic in amateur storytelling, but also showed unprecedented interest in recording stories on different aspects of literati life. These stories appeared in diverse forms, including narrative poems, “tales of the marvelous,” “records of the strange,” historical miscellanies, and transformation texts. Through storytelling, literati explored their own changing place in a society that was making its final transition from hereditary aristocracy to a meritocracy ostensibly open to all. Literati Storytelling shows how these writings offer crucial insights into the reconfiguration of the Chinese elite, which monopolized literacy, social prestige, and political participation in imperial China.
Download or read book The Chinese Love Story from the Tenth to the Fourteenth Century written by Alister D. Inglis and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-04-01 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love stories formed a major part of the classical short story genre in China from as early as the eighth century, when men of letters began to write about romantic encounters. In later centuries, such stories provided inspiration for several new literary genres. While much scholarly attention has been focused on the short story of both the medieval and late imperial eras, comparatively little work has been attempted on the interim stage, the Song and Yuan dynasties, which spanned some five hundred years from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. Yet this was a crucial developmental period for many forms of narrative literature—so much so that any understanding of late imperial narrative should be informed by the earlier tradition. The first study of its kind in English, The Chinese Love Story from the Tenth to the Fourteenth Century traces the development of the love story throughout this important yet overlooked era. Using Tang dynasty stories as a point of comparison, Alister D. Inglis examines and appraises key new themes, paying special attention to period hallmarks, gender portrayal, and textuality. Inglis demonstrates that, contrary to received scholarly wisdom, this was a highly innovative period during which writers and storytellers laid a fertile foundation for the literature of late imperial China.
Download or read book Literati Lenses written by Mia Yinxing Liu and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese cinema has a long history of engagement with China’s art traditions, and literati (wenren) landscape painting has been an enduring source of inspiration. Literati Lenses explores this interplay during the Mao era, a time when cinema, at the forefront of ideological campaigns and purges, was held to strict political guidelines. Through four films—Li Shizhen (1956), Stage Sisters (1964), Early Spring in February (1963), and Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1979)—Mia Liu reveals how landscape offered an alternative text that could operate beyond political constraints and provide a portal for smuggling interesting discourses into the film. While allusions to pictorial traditions associated with a bygone era inevitably took on different meanings in the context of Mao-era cinema, cinematic engagement with literati landscape endowed films with creative and critical space as well as political poignancy. Liu not only identifies how the conventions and aesthetics of traditional literati landscape art were reinvented and mediated on multiple levels in cinema, but also explores how post-1949 Chinese filmmakers configured themselves as modern intellectuals in the spaces forged among the vestiges of the old. In the process, she deepens her analysis, suggesting that landscape be seen as an allegory of human life, a mirror of the age, and a commentary on national affairs.
Download or read book Memory in Medieval China Text Ritual and Community written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory is not an inert container but a dynamic process. It can be structured by ritual, constrained by textual genre, and shaped by communities’ expectations and reception. Urging a particular view of the past on readers is a complex rhetorical act. The collective reception of portrayals of the past often carries weighty implications for the present and future. The essays collected in this volume investigate various aspects of memory in medieval China (ca. 100-900 CE) as performed in various genres of writing, from poetry to anecdotes, from history to tomb epitaphs. They illuminate ways in which the memory of individual persons, events, dynasties, and literary styles was constructed and revised through processes of writing and reading. Contributors include: Sarah M. Allen, Robert Ashmore, Robert Ford Campany, Jack W. Chen, Alexei Ditter, Meow Hui Goh, Christopher M. B. Nugent, Xiaofei Tian, Wendy Swartz, Ping Wang.
Download or read book How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context written by Zong-qi Cai and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context is an introduction to the golden age of Chinese poetry, spanning the earliest times through the Tang dynasty (618–907). It aims to break down barriers—between language and culture, poetry and history—that have stood in the way of teaching and learning Chinese poetry. Not only a primer in early Chinese poetry, the volume demonstrates the unique and central role of poetry in the making of Chinese culture. Each chapter focuses on a specific theme to show the interplay between poetry and the world. Readers discover the key role that poetry played in Chinese diplomacy, court politics, empire building, and institutionalized learning; as well as how poems shed light on gender and women’s status, war and knight-errantry, Daoist and Buddhist traditions, and more. The chapters also show how people of different social classes used poetry as a means of gaining entry into officialdom, creating self-identity, fostering friendship, and airing grievances. The volume includes historical vignettes and anecdotes that contextualize individual poems, investigating how some featured texts subvert and challenge the grand narratives of Chinese history. Presenting poems in Chinese along with English translations and commentary, How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context unites teaching poetry with the social circumstances surrounding its creation, making it a pioneering and versatile text for the study of Chinese language, literature, history, and culture.
Download or read book How to Read Chinese Prose written by Zong-qi Cai and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a guided introduction to Chinese nonfictional prose and its literary and cultural significance. It features more than one hundred major texts from antiquity through the Qing dynasty that exemplify major genres, styles, and forms of traditional Chinese prose. For each work, the book presents an English translation, the Chinese original, and accessible critical commentary by leading scholars. How to Read Chinese Prose teaches readers to appreciate the literary merits, stylistic devices, rhetorical choices, and argumentative techniques of a wide range of nonfictional writing. It emphasizes the interconnections among individual texts and across eras, helping readers understand the development of the literary tradition and what makes particular texts formative or distinctive within it. Organized by dynastic period and genre, the book identifies and examines four broad categories of prose—narrative, expository, descriptive, and communicative. How to Read Chinese Prose is suitable for a range of courses in Chinese literature, history, religion, and philosophy, as well as for scholars and interested readers seeking to deepen their knowledge of the Chinese prose tradition. A companion book, How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese, is designed for Chinese-language learners and features many of the same texts.
Download or read book Tales from Tang Dynasty China written by Alexei Ditter and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiled during the Song dynasty (960–1279) at the behest of Emperor Taizong, the Taiping Guangji anthologized thousands of pages of unofficial histories, accounts, and minor stories from the Tang dynasty (618–907). The twenty-two tales translated in this volume, many appearing for the first time in English, reveal the dynamism and diversity of society in Tang China. A lengthy Introduction as well as introductions to each selection further illuminate the social and historical contexts within which these narratives unfold. This collection offers a wealth of information for anyone interested in medieval Chinese history, religion, or everyday life.
Download or read book Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women s Tanci Fiction written by Li Guo and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women’s tanci, or “plucking rhymes,” are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest. Women tanci authors’ redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals of heroism. They establish a realistic tenor in affirming feminine domestic authority, and open up spaces for discussions of “womanly becoming,” female exceptionalism, and shifting family power structures. The vernacular mode underlying these texts yields productive possibilities of gendered self-representations, bodily valences, and dynamic performances of sexual roles. The result is a vernacular discursive frame that enables women’s appropriation and refashioning of orthodox moral values as means of self-affirmation and self-realization. Validations of women’s political activism and loyalism to the nation attest to tanci as a premium vehicle for disseminating progressive social incentives to popular audiences. Women’s tanci marks early modern writers’ endeavors to carve out a space of feminine becoming, a discursive arena of feminine appropriation, reinvention, and boundary-crossings. In this light, women’s tanci portrays gendered mobility through depictions of a heroine’s voyages or social ascent, and entails a forward-moving historical progression toward a more autonomous and vested model of feminine subjectivity.
Download or read book The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World written by Lynn A. Struve and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the mid-sixteenth through the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese intellectuals attended more to dreams and dreaming—and in a wider array of genres—than in any other period of Chinese history. Taking the approach of cultural history, this ambitious yet accessible work aims both to describe the most salient aspects of this “dream arc” and to explain its trajectory in time through the writings, arts, and practices of well-known thinkers, religionists, litterateurs, memoirists, painters, doctors, and political figures of late Ming and early Qing times. The volume’s encompassing thesis asserts that certain associations of dreaming, grounded in the neurophysiology of the human brain at sleep—such as subjectivity, irrationality, the unbidden, lack of control, emotionality, spontaneity, the imaginal, and memory—when especially heightened by historical and cultural developments, are likely to pique interest in dreaming and generate florescences of dream-expression among intellectuals. The work thus makes a contribution to the history of how people have understood human consciousness in various times and cultures. The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World is the most substantial work in any language on the historicity of Chinese dream culture. Within Chinese studies, it will appeal to those with backgrounds in literature, religion, philosophy, political history, and the visual arts. It will also be welcomed by readers interested in comparative dream cultures, the history of consciousness, and neurohistory.
Download or read book Tang Dynasty Tales A Guided Reader Volume 2 written by William H Nienhauser, Jr and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2016-01-11 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume supplements Tang Tales, A Guided Reader (Volume 1; 2010) and presents twelve more Tang tales, going beyond the standard corpus of these narratives to include six stories translated into English for the first time. The rich annotation and translator's notes for these twelve tales provide insights into many aspects of Tang material culture and medieval thought, including Buddhism and Daoism.In addition to meticulously annotated translations, the book offers original texts (with some textual notes), and commentaries in the form of translator's notes, thereby joining the first volume of Tang tales as the only collections that introduce students to Tang tales while also challenging specialists interested in the field.
Download or read book Tang Dynasty Tales written by William H. Nienhauser and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2016 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume supplements Tang Tales, A Guided Reader (Volume 1; 2010) and presents twelve more Tang tales, going beyond the standard corpus of these narratives to include six stories translated into English for the first time. The rich annotation and translator's notes for these twelve tales provide insights into many aspects of Tang material culture and medieval thought, including Buddhism and Daoism. In addition to meticulously annotated translations, the book offers original texts (with some textual notes), and commentaries in the form of translator's notes, thereby joining the first volume of Tang tales as the only collections that introduce students to Tang tales while also challenging specialists interested in the field."--
Download or read book Writing and Law in Late Imperial China written by Robert E. Hegel and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-08-24 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating, multidisciplinary volume, scholars of Chinese history, law, literature, and religions explore the intersections of legal practice with writing in many different social contexts. They consider the overlapping concerns of legal culture and the arts of crafting persuasive texts in a range of documents including crime reports, legislation, novels, prayers, and law suits. Their focus is the late Ming and Qing periods (c. 1550-1911); their documents range from plaints filed at the local level by commoners, through various texts produced by the well-to-do, to the legal opinions penned by China's emperors. Writing and Law in Late Imperial China explores works of crime-case fiction, judicial handbooks for magistrates and legal secretaries, popular attitudes toward clergy and merchants as reflected in legal plaints, and the belief in a parallel, otherworldly judicial system that supports earthly justice.
Download or read book Translating Chinese Art and Modern Literature written by Yifeng Sun and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translating Chinese Art and Modern Literature examines issues in cross-cultural dialogue in connection with translation and modern Chinese art and literature from interdisciplinary perspectives. This comprises the text-image dialogue in the context of Chinese modernity, and cross-cultural interaction between modern literature in Chinese and other literatures. This edited collection approaches these issues with discrete foci and approaches, and the ten chapters in this volume are to be divided into two distinct parts. The first part highlights the mutual effects between literary texts and visual images in the media of book, painting, and film, and the second part includes contributions by scholars of literary translation.
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 Anthology Of Tang And Song Tales The Tang Song Chuanqi Ji Of Lu Xun written by Victor H Mair and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 863 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first complete English rendition of the 45 famous tales in the monumental anthology masterfully selected and edited by Lu Xun (1881-1936). It is the most distinctive, authoritative, and influential chuanqi collection thus far, and many of the pieces are rendered for the first time. This is an important contribution to the field of Chinese studies in the English-speaking world.
Download or read book The Secret Life of Literature written by Lisa Zunshine and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works. For over four thousand years, writers have been experimenting with what cognitive scientists call “mindreading”: constantly devising new social contexts for making their audiences imagine complex mental states of characters and narrators. In The Secret Life of Literature, Lisa Zunshine uncovers these mindreading patterns, which have, until now, remained invisible to both readers and critics, in works ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Invisible Man. Bringing together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary studies, this engaging book transforms our understanding of literary history. Central to Zunshine’s argument is the exploration of mental states “embedded” within each other, as, for instance, when Ellison’s Invisible Man is aware of how his white Communist Party comrades pretend not to understand what he means, when they want to reassert their position of power. Paying special attention to how race, class, and gender inform literary embedments, Zunshine contrasts this dynamic with real-life patterns studied by cognitive and social psychologists. She also considers community-specific mindreading values and looks at the rise and migration of embedment patterns across genres and national literary traditions, noting particularly the use of deception, eavesdropping, and shame as plot devices. Finally, she investigates mindreading in children’s literature. Stories for children geared toward different stages of development, she shows, provide cultural scaffolding for initiating young readers into a long-term engagement with the secret life of literature.
Download or read book Heroines of the Qing written by Binbin Yang and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heroines of the Qing introduces an array of Chinese women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were powerful, active subjects of their own lives and who wrote themselves as the heroines of their exemplary stories. Traditionally, “exemplary women” (lienu)—heroic martyrs, chaste widows, and faithful maidens, for example—were written into official dynastic histories for their unrelenting adherence to female virtue by Confucian family standards. However, despite the rich writing traditions about these women, their lives were often distorted by moral and cultural agendas. Binbin Yang, drawing on interdisciplinary sources, shows how they were able to cross boundaries that were typically closed to women—boundaries not only of gender, but also of knowledge, economic power, political engagement, and ritual and cultural authority. Yang closely examines the rhetorical strategies these “exemplary women” exploited for self-representation in various writing genres and highlights their skillful negotiation with, and appropriation of, the values of female exemplarity for self-empowerment.
