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"Scholars who know classical Chinese have been reading and citing Hon Mai's wonderful collection for many years. Now students can access these informative materials through Zhang's lively English translations. They are both fun to read and deeply informative about daily life, religion, markets, and multiple social groups in the twelfth century. The comprehensive thematic guide allows readers to locate tales by subject matter, making this collection of 100 narratives ideal for classroom use." —Valerie Hansen, Yale University
Personal accounts help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in the Chinese tradition. From poetry, letters, and diaries to statements in legal proceedings, these engaging and readable works draw us into the past and provide vivid details of life as it was lived from the pre-imperial period to the nineteenth century. Some focus on a person?s entire life, others on a specific moment. Some have an element of humor, others are entirely serious. Taken together, these selections offer an intimate vie...
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 importa...
During the Song (960-1279), all educated Chinese men traveled frequently, journeying long distances to attend school and take civil service examinations. They crisscrossed the country to assume government posts, report back to the capital, and return home between assignments and to attend to family matters. Based on a wide array of texts, Transformative Journeys analyzes the impact of travel on this group of elite men and the places they visited. In the first part of the book, Cong Ellen Zhang considers the practical aspects of travel during the Song in the context of state mobilization of and assistance to government travelers, including the infrastructure of waterways and highways, the bur...
"Tens of thousands of epitaphs or funerary biographies survive from imperial China. Written to be engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased's biographical information and exemplary words and deeds, expressing survivors' longing for the dead. Epitaphs provide glimpses of the lives of people who are not well-documented in such sources as the dynastic histories and local gazetteers: women, men who did not leave a mark politically, and children. This anthology makes available a set of funerary biographies covering nearly two thousand years of history, from the Han dynasty through the nineteenth century, selected for their potential as teaching material for cou...
During the Song (960-1279), all educated Chinese men traveled frequently, journeying long distances to attend school and take civil service examinations. They crisscrossed the country to assume government posts, report back to the capital, and return home between assignments and to attend to family matters. Based on a wide array of texts, Transformative Journeys analyzes the impact of travel on this group of elite men and the places they visited. In the first part of the book, Cong Ellen Zhang considers the practical aspects of travel during the Song in the context of state mobilization of and assistance to government travelers, including the infrastructure of waterways and highways, the bur...
It is now recognized that emotions have a history. In this book, eleven scholars examine a variety of emotions in ancient China and classical Greece, in their historical and social context. A general introduction presents the major issues in the analysis of emotions across cultures and over time in a given tradition. Subsequent chapters consider how specific emotions evolve and change. For example, whereas for early Chinese thinkers, worry was a moral defect, it was later celebrated as a sign that one took responsibility for things. In ancient Greece, hope did not always focus on a positive outcome, and in this respect differed from what we call “hope.” Daring not to do, or “undaring,...
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 ...
The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization. The authors also explore different diary formats, including the travel diary, the private diary, conflict diaries written during periods of crisis, and the diaries of the digital era, such as blogs. The Diary offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary study to enrich our understanding of, research about, and engagement with the diary as literary form and historical documentation.
Examines the intersection of politics and intergenerational family relations in China from the Qing period to 1949.