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Bannermen Tales (Zidishu)
Bannermen Tales is the first book in English to offer a comprehensive study of zidishu (bannermen tales)—a popular storytelling genre created by the Manchus in early eighteenth-century Beijing. Contextualizing zidishu in Qing dynasty Beijing, this book examines both bilingual (Manchu-Chinese) and pure Chinese texts, recalls performance venues and features, and discusses their circulation and reception into the early twentieth century. With its original translations, musical score, and numerous illustrations of hand-copied and printed zidishu texts, this study opens a new window into Qing literature and provides a broader basis for evaluating the process of cultural hybridization. To go bey...
Speaking of Profit
"In the first half of the nineteenth century the Qing Empire faced a crisis. It was broadly perceived both inside and outside of government that the “prosperous age” of the eighteenth century was over. Bureaucratic corruption and malaise, population pressure and food shortages, ecological and infrastructural decay, domestic and frontier rebellion, adverse balances of trade, and, eventually, a previously inconceivable foreign threat from the West seemed to present hopelessly daunting challenges. This study uses the literati reformer Bao Shichen as a prism to understand contemporary perceptions of and proposed solutions to this general crisis. Though Bao only briefly and inconsequentially ...
Proceedings of the First North American Conference on Manchu Studies: Studies in Manchu literature and history
Majority of the papers presented at the conference.
Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE
Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience? In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE, Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Dao...
Shen Gua's Empiricism
"Shen Gua (1031–1095) is a household name in China, known as a distinguished renaissance man and the author of Brush Talks from Dream Brook, an old text whose remarkable “scientific” discoveries make it appear curiously ahead of its time. In this first book-length study of Shen in English, Ya Zuo reveals the connection between Shen’s life as an active statesman and his ideas, specifically the empirical stance manifested through his wide-ranging inquiries. She places Shen on the broad horizon of premodern Chinese thought, and presents his empiricism within an extensive narrative of Chinese epistemology. Relying on Shen as a searchlight, Zuo focuses in on how an individual thinker summoned conditions and concepts from the vast Chinese intellectual tradition to build a singular way of knowing. Moreover, her study of Shen provides insights into the complex dynamics in play at the dawn of the age of Neo-Confucianism and compels readers to achieve a deeper appreciation of the diversity in Chinese thinking."
Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture
A poetic culture consists of a body of shared values and conventions that shape the composition and interpretation of poetry in a given historical period. This book on Wang Anshi (1021–1086) and Song poetic culture—the first of its kind in any Western language—brings into focus a cluster of issues that are central to the understanding of both the poet and his cultural milieu. These issues include the motivations and consequences of poetic contrarianism and the pursuit of novelty, the relationship between anthology compilation and canon formation, the entanglement of poetry with partisan politics, Buddhist orientations in poetic language, and the development of the notion of late style. Though diverse in nature and scope, the issues all bear the stamp of the period as well as Wang Anshi’s distinct personality. Conceived of largely as a series of case studies, the book’s individual chapters may be read independently of each other, but together they form a varied, if only partial, mosaic of Wang Anshi’s work and its critical reception in the larger context of Song poetic culture.
Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos
"""Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos"", the first book focusing on premortem shrines in any era of Chinese history, places the institution at the intersection of politics and religion. When a local official left his post, grateful subjects housed an image of him in a temple, requiting his grace: that was the ideal model. By Ming times, the “living shrine” was legal, old, and justified by readings of the classics. Sarah Schneewind argues that the institution could invite and pressure officials to serve local interests; the policies that had earned a man commemoration were carved into stone beside the shrine. Since everyone recognized that elite men might honor living offi...
Just a Song
"“Song Lyric,” ci, remains one of the most loved forms of Chinese poetry. From the early eleventh century through the first quarter of the twelfth century, song lyric evolved from an impromptu contribution in a performance practice to a full literary genre, in which the text might be read more often than performed. Young women singers, either indentured or private entrepreneurs, were at the heart of song practice throughout the period; the authors of the lyrics were notionally mostly male. A strange gender dynamic arose, in which men often wrote in the voice of a woman and her imagined feelings, then appropriated that sensibility for themselves. As an essential part of becoming literature, a history was constructed for the new genre. At the same time the genre claimed a new set of aesthetic values to radically distinguish it from older “Classical Poetry,” shi. In a world that was either pragmatic or moralizing (or both), song lyric was a discourse of sensibility, which literally gave a beautiful voice to everything that seemed increasingly to be disappearing in the new Song dynasty world of righteousness and public advancement."
Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks
Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks explores the key role played by elite Daoists in social and cultural life in Ming China, notably by mediating between local networks—biological lineages, territorial communities, temples, and festivals—and the state. They did this through their organization in clerical lineages—their own empire-wide networks for channeling knowledge, patronage, and resources—and by controlling central temples that were nodes of local social structures. In this book, the only comprehensive social history of local Daoism during the Ming largely based on literary sources and fieldwork, Richard G. Wang delineates the interface between local organizations (such as line...
The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE - 800 CE
Dreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape—an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke—that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions. In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to q...
