Download or read book Ming Erotic Novellas written by Richard G Wang and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2011-03-13 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Wang's Ming Erotic Novellas is path breaking in its attention to a virtually ignored body of literature that certainly influenced the writing of the Jin Ping Mei, the Sanyan vernacular stories, and most likely Li Yu's fiction. Compared to other titles in the field, this is the first scholarly monograph in any language to contextualize the erotic novellas of late imperial China. Moreover, existing studies in this area have tended to concentrate on a limited number of works of Chinese erotic fiction, or have only brushed up against these works tangentially during more general discussion of Ming and Qing literature. Ming Erotic Novellas adopts a provocative approach to fiction, moving beyond the traditional textual analyses of gender politics and the qing cult, and examining these erotic novellas as a new genre within the contexts of print culture, readership, consumption patterns, as well as religious dimensions. Ming Erotic Novellas focuses on a group of mid to late Ming literary (wenyan) novellas, which are all stories of erotic romance. These novellas include a profusion of poems mixed with prose narratives that are characterized by "simple" literary Chinese, with a tendency toward the vernacular. Their plots are complex, with some running 20,000 characters or more, allowing for nuanced character development, rich dialogue, and psychological description. Circulated widely during the Ming, the novellas had a significant impact on later erotic and "scholarbeauty" (caizi jiaren) novels. This particular group of novellas was of great importance in the development of Chinese fiction, functioning as a transitional link between the classical tale to the vernacular novel. By approaching these works through the lens of a cultural study, Wang is able to explore the social functions of the novellas as well as their significance in the development of Chinese fiction in the Ming cultural context.
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 Eroticism and Other Literary Conventions in Chinese Literature written by I-Hsien Wu and published by Cambria Sinophone World. This book was released on 2017 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on the novel's rich content and this vast scholarship, and using Julia Kristeva's terms on intertextuality, this book presents a new understanding of the famous Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber (The Story of the Stone). This is a must-read for anyone interested in Hongloumeng and Chinese literature.
Download or read book The Fountainhead of Chinese Erotica written by Charles R. Stone and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-03-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction (Ruyijun zhuan), a short work of fiction from the early sixteenth century, tells the story of the Tang dynasty's notorious Wu Zetian, the only woman to rule as emperor of China. It is famous not for the history it relates, but for its graphic sexual descriptions--the first ever in a Chinese novel--purportedly given from a woman's point of view. Despite its renown and unmistakable influence on later writing, the origins and significance of the Ruyijun zhuan have never been explored, in any language, and until now it has never been translated. Its date of composition is unknown, its author unidentified. One of its earliest appraisals, written by a contemporary scholar known for his conservatism, maintains that the Ruyijun zhuan is a moral work notwithstanding its sexual content. Combining a complete translation with a detailed and far-ranging study of the text, The Fountainhead of Chinese Erotica places this important cultural document into historical context and offers possibilities on its meaning.
Download or read book In the Inner Quarters written by Mengchu Ling and published by arsenal pulp press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of five erotic stories from Ming dynasty China, in English for the first time.
Download or read book Misers Shrews and Polygamists written by Keith McMahon and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China. In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as well-known as Dream of the Red Chamber, Keith McMahon identifies a sexual economy defined by the figures of the "miser" and the "shrew"--caricatures of the retentive, self-containing man and the overflowing, male-enervating woman. Among these and other characters, the author explores the issues surrounding the practice of polygamy, the logic of its overvaluation of masculinity, and the nature of sexuality generally in Chinese society. How does the man with many wives manage and justify his sexual authority? Why and how might he escape or limit this presumed authority, sometimes to the point of portraying himself as abject before the shrewish woman? How do women accommodate or coddle the man, or else oppose, undermine, or remold him? And in what sense does the man place himself lower than the spiritually and morally superior woman? The most extensive English-language study of Chinese literature from the eighteenth century, this examination of polygamy will interest not only students of Chinese history, culture, and literature but also all those concerned with histories of gender and sexuality.
Download or read book Saying All That Can Be Said written by Keith McMahon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Saying All That Can Be Said, Keith McMahon presents the first full analysis of the sexually explicit portrayals in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Countering common views of those portrayals as “just sex” or as “bad sex,” he shows that they are rich in thematic meaning and loaded with social and aesthetic purpose. McMahon places the novel in the historical context of Chinese sexual culture, from which Jin Ping Mei inherits the style of the elegant, metaphorical description of erotic pleasure, but which the anonymous author extends in an exploration of the explicit, the obscene, and the graphic. The novel uses explicit description to evaluate and comment on characters, situations, and sexual and psychic states of being. Echoing the novel’s way of taking sex as a vehicle for reading the world, McMahon celebrates the richness and exuberance of Jin Ping Mei’s language of sex, which refuses imprisonment within the boundaries of orthodox culture’s cleanly authoritative style, and which continues to inspire admiration from readers around the world. Saying All That Can Be Said will change the way we think about sexual culture in premodern China.
Download or read book The Ming Prince and Daoism written by Richard G. Wang and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-08-23 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of Daoism in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) have paid particular attention to the interaction between the court and certain Daoist priests and to the political results of such interaction; the focus has been on either emperors or Daoist masters. Yet in the Ming era, a special group of people patronized Daoism and Daoist establishments: these were the members of the imperial clan, who were enfeoffed as as princes. By illuminating the role the Ming princes played in local religion, Richard G.W Wang demonstrates in 'The Ming Prince and Daoism' that the princedom sa served to mediate between official religious policy and the commooners' interests ... . Locally, the Ming princes played an important cultural role as well by promoting the development of local religions. This book is the first to explore the interaction between Ming princes as religious patrons and local Daoism. Barred by imperial law from any serious political or military engagement, the Ming princes were ex officio managers of state rituals at the local level, with Daoist priests as key performers. Moreover, institutionally, most regular ceremonies related to a prince's life, were mandated to be conducted by Daoist musician-dancers, and as a result the princely courtly rites were characterized by a Daoist flavor. For this reason the princes became very closely involved in Daoist clerical and liturgical life.
Download or read book Fruitful Sites written by Craig Clunas and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. As the first account in English to be wholly based on contemporary Chinese sources, this innovative, beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming dynasty China (1368-1644) firmly in the social and cultural history of the day. Who owned Ming gardens? Who visited them? How were they represented in words, in paintings, and in visual culture generally, and what meanings did these representations hold at different levels of Chinese society? How did the discourse of gardens intersect with other discourses such as those of aesthetics, agronomy, geomancy, and botany? By examining the gardens of the city of Suzhou from a number of different angles, Craig Clunas provides a rich picture of a complex cultural phenomenon--one that was of crucial importance to the self-fashioning of the Ming elite. Drawing on a wide range of recent work in cultural theory, the author provides for the first time a historical and materialist account of Chinese garden culture, and replaces broad generalizations and orientalist fantasy with a convincing picture of the garden's role in social life. Fruitful Sites will appeal to all students of China's cultural history, to students of garden history from any part of the world, to art historians, and to readers engaged in Asian and cultural studies.
Download or read book 1616 Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu s China written by Tian Yuan Tan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year is 1616. William Shakespeare has just died and the world of the London theatres is mourning his loss. 1616 also saw the death of the famous Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu. Four hundred years on and Shakespeare is now an important meeting place for Anglo-Chinese cultural dialogue in the field of drama studies. In June 2014 (the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth), SOAS, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the National Chung Cheng University of Taiwan gathered 20 scholars together to reflect on the theatrical practice of four hundred years ago and to ask: what does such an exploration mean culturally for us today? This ground-breaking study offers fresh insights into the respective theatrical worlds of Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu and asks how the brave new theatres of 1616 may have a vital role to play in the intercultural dialogue of our own time.
Download or read book Sex in China written by Fang Fu Ruan and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China today is sexually (and in many other ways) a very repressive so ciety, yet ancient China was very different. Some of the earliest surviving literature of China is devoted to discussions of sexual topics, and the sexual implications of the Ym and Yang theories common in ancient China continue to influence Tantric and esoteric sexual practices today far dis tant from their Chinese origins. In recent years, a number of books have been written exploring the history of sexual practices and ideas in China, but most have ended the discussion with ancient China and have not continued up to the present time. Fang Fu Ruan first surveys the ancient assumptions and beliefs, then carries the story to present-day China with brief descriptions of homosexuality, lesbianism, transvestism, transsexualism, and prostitution, and ends with a chapter on changing attitudes toward sex in China today. Dr. Ruan is well qualified to give such an overview. Until he left China in the 1980s, he was a leader in attempting to change the repressive attitudes of the government toward human sexuality. He wrote a best selling book on sex in China, and had written to and corresponded with a number of people in China who considered him as confidant and ad visor about their sex problems. A physician and medical historian, Dr. Ruan's doctoral dissertation was a study of the history of sex in China.
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: The contributors to Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions draw attention to ‘wanton woman’ themes across time as they were portrayed in court history (McMahon), fiction (Stevenson), drama (Lam, Wu), and songs and ballads (Ôki, Epstein, McLaren). Looking back, the essays challenge us with views of sexual transgression that are more heterogeneous than modern popular focus on Pan Jinlian would suggest. Central among the many insights to be found is that despite gender performance in Chinese history being overwhelmingly determined by the needs of patriarchal authority, men and women in the late imperial period discovered diverse ways in which to reflect on how men constantly sought their own bearings in reference to women.
Download or read book Causality and Containment in Seventeenth Century Chinese Fiction written by Keith McMahon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A number of features characterize late Ming vernacular fiction as part of the general cultural expansion of that period. These features centrally include the exposition of sexual transgression and the function of containment, by which is meant the ideology of the control of desires. The late Ming writers are studiously devoted to illustrating minute, obscene, or erotic details that belief the decorum of the orthodox surface. However, this subversiveness of detail decreases in intensity from the late Ming to the early Qing, when values of containment are reinvoked. Related topics are: the theme of causality and its role in the story's mapping of the logic of adultery; adultery as an emblem of the woman's escape from containment and the use of the narrative topos of the gap in the wall as a locus of sexual transgression.
Download or read book Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China 1580 1700 written by Daria Berg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the works of key women writers within their cultural, artistic and socio-political contexts, this book considers changes in the perception of women in early modern China. The sixteenth century brought rapid developments in technology, commerce and the publishing industry that saw women emerging in new roles as both consumers and producers of culture. This book examines the place of women in the cultural elite and in society more generally, reconstructing examples of particular women’s personal experiences, and retracing the changing roles of women from the late Ming to the early Qing era (1580-1700). Providing rich detail of exceptionally fine, interesting and engaging literary works, this book opens fascinating new windows onto the lives, dreams, nightmares, anxieties and desires of the authors and the world out of which they emerged.
Download or read book Bandits in Print written by Scott W. Gregory and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-15 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bandits in Print examines the world of print in early modern China, focusing on the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan). Depending on which edition a reader happened upon, The Water Margin could offer vastly different experiences, a characteristic of the early modern Chinese novel genre and the shifting print culture of the era. Scott W. Gregory argues that the traditional novel is best understood as a phenomenon of print. He traces the ways in which this particularly influential novel was adapted and altered in the early modern era as it crossed the boundaries of elite and popular, private and commercial, and civil and martial. Moving away from ultimately unanswerable questions about authorship and urtext, Gregory turns instead to the editor-publishers who shaped the novel by crafting their own print editions. By examining the novel in its various incarnations, Bandits in Print shows that print is not only a stabilizing force on literary texts; in particular circumstances and with particular genres, the print medium can be an agent of textual change.
Download or read book Changing Chinese Masculinities written by Kam Louie and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is now almost a cliché to claim that China and the Chinese people have changed. Yet inside the new clothing that is worn by the Chinese man today, Kam Louie contends, we still see much of the historical Chinese man. With contributions from a team of outstanding scholars, Changing Chinese Masculinitiesstudies a range of Chinese men in diverse and, most importantly, Chinese contexts. It explores the fundamental meaning of manhood in the Chinese setting and the very notion of an indigenous Chinese masculinity. In twelve chapters spanning the late imperial period to the present day, Changing Chinese Masculinitiesbrings a much needed historical dimension to the discussion. Key aspects defining the male identity such as family relationships and attitudes toward sex, class, and career are explored in depth. Familiar notions of Chinese manhood come in all shapes and sizes. Concubinage reemerges as the taking of “second wives” in recent decades. Male homoerotic love and male prostitution are shown to have long historical roots. The self-images of the literati and officials form an interesting contrast with those of the contemporary white-collar men. Masculinity and nationalism complement each other in troubling ways. China has indeed changed and is still changing, but most of these social transformations do not indicate a complete break with past beliefs or practices in gender relations. Changing Chinese Masculinities inaugurates the Hong Kong University Press book series “Transnational Asian Masculinities.” “Produced by a group of outstanding scholars, this volume offers important insights into little-known aspects of Chinese masculinity. An indispensable reference for those with an interest in Chinese sexuality, social history, and contemporary Chinese culture.” —Anne McLaren, professor of Chinese studies, University of Melbourne “In this book, scholars of late imperial and contemporary China gather to define and critique masculinity in both periods, explore its complexities, and map continuities and discontinuities. What are the traditional models and to what degree do they still maintain a grip today? Is there a ‘masculinity crisis’ in China, and what does it mean to be a Chinese man today? These are some of the daring topics the authors explore.” —Keith McMahon, professor of Chinese language and literature, University of Kansas
Download or read book Fin de Si cle Splendor written by Dewei Wang and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reigning view of literary historians has been that the May Fourth movement of 1919 marks the division between the traditional and the modern in Chinese literature. This book argues that signs of reform and innovation can be discerned long before May Fourth, and that as China entered the arena of modern, international history in the late Qing, it was already developing its own complex matrix of incipient modernities. It demonstrates that late Qing fiction nurtured a creative, innovative poetics, one that was spurned by the reformers of the May Fourth generation in favor of Western-style realism. The author recognizes that a full account of modern Chinese fiction needs to ask why so many genres, styles, themes, and figures found in late imperial fiction were repressed by "modern" Chinese literary discourse. He focuses on four genres of late Qing fiction that have been either rudely dismissed in pejorative terms or simply ignored: depravity romances, court-case and chivalric cycles, grotesque exposés, and scientific fantasies. The author shows that in spite of the realist orthodoxy that has dominated Chinese literature since the May Fourth movement, these unwelcome genres have continually found their way back into mainstream discourse, their influence being increasingly evident in recent decades. This first comprehensive study of late Qing fiction discusses more than sixty works, at least half of which have rarely or never been dealt with by Western or Chinese scholars. Richly informed by contemporary literary theory, this book constitutes a polemical rethinking of the nature of Chinese literary and cultural modernity.
