Download or read book Writing and Literacy in Early China written by Feng Li and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence and spread of literacy in ancient human society an important topic for all who study the ancient world, and the development of written Chinese is of particular interest, as modern Chinese orthography preserves logographic principles shared by its most ancient forms, making it unique among all present-day writing systems. In the past three decades, the discovery of previously unknown texts dating to the third century BCE and earlier, as well as older versions of known texts, has revolutionized the study of early Chinese writing. The long-term continuity and stability of the Chinese written language allow for this detailed study of the role literacy played in early civilization. The contributors to Writing and Literacy in Early China inquire into modes of manuscript production, the purposes for which texts were produced, and the ways in which they were actually used. By carefully evaluating current evidence and offering groundbreaking new interpretations, the book illuminates the nature of literacy for scribes and readers.
Download or read book Mandarin Chinese Language Composition Notebook written by Tuttle Publishing and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beautiful notebook makes studying a pleasure! Each double page spread has squared paper on the right-hand side for practicing formation of the Chinese characters, and lined paper on the left-hand side for note-taking. A ten-page reference section at the back of the notebook gives Mandarin character charts, key vocabulary, and basic grammar tips. Contents: Pages 1-118 Alternate pages of lined and squared paper for note-taking and handwriting practice Pages 119-120 Chinese Character charts Pages 121-124 Key vocabulary lists Pages 125-128 Basic grammar tips
Download or read book Writing and Authority in Early China written by Mark Edward Lewis and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience in early China, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. Its central theme is the emergence of this body of writings as the textual double of the state, and of the text-based sage as the double of the ruler. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, such as divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, the collective writings of philosophical and textual traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. Lewis shows how these writings served to administer populations, control officials, form new social groups, invent new models of authority, and create an artificial language whose master generated power and whose graphs became potent objects.
Download or read book Writing and Materiality in China written by Judith T. Zeitlin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speaking about Chinese writing entails thinking about how writing speaks through various media. In the guises of the written character and its imprints, traces, or ruins, writing is more than textuality. The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China’s literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing. To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another. Thinking about writing as the material product of a culture shifts the emphasis from the author as the creator and ultimate arbiter of a text’s meaning to the editors, publishers, collectors, and readers through whose hands a text is reshaped, disseminated, and given new meanings. By yoking writing and materiality, the contributors to this volume aim to bypass the tendency to oppose form and content, words and things, documents and artifacts, to rethink key issues in the interpretation of Chinese literary and visual culture.
Download or read book China in Ten Words written by Yu Hua and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of China’s most acclaimed writers: a unique, intimate look at the Chinese experience over the last several decades. Framed by ten phrases common in the Chinese vernacular, China in Ten Words uses personal stories and astute analysis to reveal as never before the world’s most populous yet oft-misunderstood nation. In "Disparity," for example, Yu Hua illustrates the expanding gaps that separate citizens of the country. In "Copycat," he depicts the escalating trend of piracy and imitation as a creative new form of revolutionary action. And in "Bamboozle," he describes the increasingly brazen practices of trickery, fraud, and chicanery that are, he suggests, becoming a way of life at every level of society. Witty, insightful, and courageous, this is a refreshingly candid vision of the "Chinese miracle" and all of its consequences.
Download or read book Kingdom of Characters Pulitzer Prize Finalist written by Jing Tsu and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.
Download or read book Reading and Writing Chinese written by William McNaughton and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a complete and easy–to–use guide for reading and writing Chinese characters. Learning written Chinese is an essential part of mastering the Chinese language. Used as a standard by students and teachers learning to read Chinese and write Chinese for more than three decades, the bestselling Reading & Writing Chinese has been thoroughly revised and updated. Reading & Writing Chinese places at your fingertips the essential 1,725 Chinese characters' current definitions, derivations, pronunciations, and examples of correct usage by utilizing cleverly condensed grids. This guide also focuses on Pinyin, which is the official system to transcribe Hanzi, Chinese characters, into Latin script, now universally used in mainland China and Singapore. Traditional characters (still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) are also included, making this a complete reference. Newly updated and revised, these characters are the ones officially prescribed by the Chinese government for the internationally recognized test of proficiency in Chinese, the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK). The student's ability to read and write Chinese are reinforced throughout the text. Key features of this newly-expanded edition include: The 1,725 most frequently used characters in both Simplified and Traditional forms. All 2,633 characters and 5,000+ compounds required for the HSK Exam. Standard Hanyu Pinyin romanizations. More mnemonic phrases and etymologies to help you remember the characters. An extensive introduction, alphabetical index, and index according to stroke count and stroke order. Completely updated/expanded English definitions. Convenient quick-reference tables of radicals. Updated and revised compounds, plus 25% more vocabulary now offered. Codes to assist those who are preparing for the AP exam or the HSK exam.
Download or read book Sinographies written by Eric Hayot and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Sinographies' examines topics like colonialism, literary modernism, translation, anime, and Tibet. As a whole, this volume imagines sinography as a new methodological approach to the study of China, one that clears ground for new kinds of comparative work.
Download or read book Reading and Writing Chinese written by William McNaughton and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading and Writing Chinese has been the standard text for foreign students and self-teachers of the Chinese Writing System since Tuttle first published it over 20 years ago. This new, completely revised edition offers students a more convenient, efficient, and up-to-date introduction to the writing system.
Download or read book Writing Women in Modern China written by Amy D. Dooling and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past few years have seen a burgeoning effort to rethink questions of women, writing, and gender in modern China. Here 22 works of fiction, drama, autobiography, essays, and poetry, each prefaced by the author's photograph and a short biographical sketch, introduce women whose literary careers coincided with an era of tremendous social, political, and cultural turbulence. 18 illustrations.
Download or read book Writing Pirates written by Yuanfei Wang and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-06-23 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines writings on China's oceanic piracy wars of the sixteenth century
Download or read book Chinese Rhetoric and Writing written by Andy Kirkpatrick and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andy Kirkpatrick and and Zhichang Xu offer a response to the argument that Chinese students’ academic writing in English is influenced by “culturally nuanced rhetorical baggage that is uniquely Chinese and hard to eradicate.” Noting that this argument draws from “an essentially monolingual and Anglo-centric view of writing,” they point out that the rapid growth in the use of English worldwide calls for “a radical reassessment of what English is in today’s world.” The result is a book that provides teachers of writing, and in particular those involved in the teaching of English academic writing to Chinese students, an introduction to key stages in the development of Chinese rhetoric, a wide-ranging field with a history of several thousand years. Understanding this important rhetorical tradition provides a strong foundation for assessing and responding to the writing of this growing group of students.
Download or read book Herself an Author written by Grace S. Fong and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-05-08 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Grace Fong has written a wonderful history of female writers’ participation in the elite conventions of Chinese poetics. Fong’s recovery of many of these poets, her able exegesis and elegant, analytical grasp of what the poets were doing is a great read, and her bilingual presentation of their poetry gives the book additional power. This is a persuasive and elegant study." —Tani Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism "In this quietly authoritative book, Grace Fong has brought a group of women poets back to life. Previously ignored by scholars because of their marginal status or the inaccessibility of their works, these remarkable writers now speak to us about the sensualities, pains, satisfactions, and sadness of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Professor Fong—a superb translator of Chinese poetry, prose, and criticism—has rendered the works of these women in a way that is true both to our theoretical concerns and theirs." —Dorothy Ko, author of Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding "Professor Fong approaches the poetry of Ming-Qing upper-class women as a social-cultural activity that allowed these women to manifest their agency and assert their own subjectivity against the background of virtual and actual networks of fellow female poets. As the distillation of more than ten years of research by one of the leading scholars in this field, this work is a timely contribution that eminently deserves our attention. Given the inclusion of translations of some of the texts discussed, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to the reading of women’s poetry of the Ming-Qing period." —Wilt Idema, Harvard University Herself an Author addresses the critical question of how to approach the study of women’s writing. It explores various methods of engaging in a meaningful way with a rich corpus of poetry and prose written by women of the late Ming and Qing periods, much of it rediscovered by the author in rare book collections in China and the United States. The volume treats different genres of writing and includes translations of texts that are made available for the first time in English. Among the works considered are the life-long poetic record of Gan Lirou, the lyrical travel journal kept by Wang Fengxian, and the erotic poetry of the concubine Shen Cai. Taking the view that gentry women’s varied textual production was a form of cultural practice, Grace Fong examines women’s autobiographical poetry collections, travel writings, and critical discourse on the subject of women’s poetry, offering fresh insights on women’s intervention into the dominant male literary tradition. The wealth of texts translated and discussed here include fascinating documents written by concubines—women who occupied a subordinate position in the family and social system. Fong adopts the notion of agency as a theoretical focus to investigate forms of subjectivity and enactments of subject positions in the intersection between textual practice and social inscription. Her reading of the life and work of women writers reveals surprising instances and modes of self-empowerment within the gender constraints of Confucian orthodoxy. Fong argues that literate women in late imperial China used writing and reading to create literary and social communities, transcend temporal-spatial and social limitations, and represent themselves as the authors of their own life histories.
Download or read book Reinventing Modern China written by Huaiyin Li and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive account of Chinese historiography on modern China. It examines the major master narratives and modes of narration in representing the events and overarching themes in modern Chinese history.
Download or read book Writing Chinese written by L. Chen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-04-29 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comparative study of the politics of Chinese cultural identity facing China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US-Chinese, and the Chinese diaspora in the West. The author challenges current discussions of hybridity and nationalism by contrasting the experiences of Taiwan, Hong Kong and US-Chinese with those of China and the Chinese diaspora.
Download or read book Writing Publishing and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China 1100 1700 written by Joseph R. Dennis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is the definitive study of imperial Chinese local gazetteers, one of the most important sources for premodern Chinese studies. Methodologically innovative, it represents a major contribution to the history of books, publishing, reading, and society.By examining how gazetteers were read, Joseph R. Dennis illustrates their significance in local societies and national discourses. His analysis of how gazetteers were initiated and produced reconceptualizes the geography of imperial Chinese publishing. Whereas previous studies argued that publishing, and thus cultural and intellectual power, were concentrated in the southeast, Dennis shows that publishing and book ownership were widely dispersed throughout China and books were found even in isolated locales. Adding a dynamic element to our earlier understanding of the publishing industry, Dennis tracks the movements of manuscripts to printers and print labor to production sites. By reconstructing printer business zones, he demonstrates that publishers operated across long distances in trans-regional markets. He also creates the first substantial data set on publishing costs in early modern China—a foundational breakthrough in understanding the world of Chinese books. Dennis’s work reveals areas for future research on newly-identified regional publishing centers and the economics of book production."
Download or read book Writing for Print written by Suyoung Son and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book examines the widespread practice of self-publishing by writers in late imperial China, focusing on the relationships between manuscript tradition and print convention, peer patronage and popular fame, and gift exchange and commercial transactions in textual production and circulation.Combining approaches from various disciplines, such as history of the book, literary criticism, and bibliographical and textual studies, Suyoung Son reconstructs the publishing practices of two seventeenth-century literati-cum-publishers, Zhang Chao in Yangzhou and Wang Zhuo in Hangzhou, and explores the ramifications of these practices on eighteenth-century censorship campaigns in Qing China and Chosŏn Korea. By giving due weight to the writers as active agents in increasing the influence of print, this book underscores the contingent nature of print’s effect and its role in establishing the textual authority that the literati community, commercial book market, and imperial authorities competed to claim in late imperial China."
