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The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China
Using the concept of theatricality to study Water Margin and Journey to the West, this study illustrates how writing and reading in early modern China became fused with a theatrical imagination in response to destabilizing social and political forces.
The Figurative Works of Chen Hongshou (1599-1652)
Despite the importance of Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) as an artist and scholar of the late Ming period, until now no full length study in English has focused on his work. Author Tamara H. Bentley takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach, treating Chen's oeuvre in relation to literary themes and economic changes, and linking these larger concerns to visual analyses. In so doing, Bentley sheds new light not only on Chen, but also on an important cultural moment in the first half of the seventeenth century, when Chinese scholar artists began to direct their work towards anonymous public markets.
The Cambridge Illustrated History of China
A look at the over eight thousand year history and civilization of China.
Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables
In 1967 a body of Chinese texts was discovered in a tomb outside Shanghai. It contained a set of unique examples of an oral genre favoured by unlearned classes in the late imperial period (15th century), best called 'chantefables', appearing at the beginning of a profound historical shift which resulted in a broadening of the uses of writing and printing in China. These texts are now generally seen to occupy an important place in the development of Chinese literature as a whole, and of Chinese vernacular literature in particular. In the first monographic treatment of all the chantefable corpus in English the author, by examination from a more anthropological view, points out that these 'oral...
Through a Forest of Chancellors
Liu Yuan’s Lingyan ge, a woodblock-printed book from 1669, re-creates a portrait gallery that memorialized 24 vassals of the early Tang court. Liu accompanied each figure, presented under the guise of a bandit, with a couplet; the poems, written in various scripts, are surrounded by marginal images that allude to a contemporary novel. Religious icons supplement the portrait gallery. Liu’s re-creation is fraught with questions. This study examines the dialogues created among the texts and images in Lingyan ge from multiple perspectives. Analysis of the book’s materialities demonstrates how Lingyan ge embodies, rather than reflects, the historical moment in which it was made. Liu unveile...
The Confusions of Pleasure
The Ming dynasty was the last great Chinese dynasty before the Manchu conquest in 1644. During that time, China, not Europe, was the center of the world: the European voyages of exploration were searching not just for new lands but also for new trade routes to the Far East. In this book, Timothy Brook eloquently narrates the changing landscape of life over the three centuries of the Ming (1368-1644), when China was transformed from a closely administered agrarian realm into a place of commercial profits and intense competition for status. The Confusions of Pleasure marks a significant departure from the conventional ways in which Chinese history has been written. Rather than recounting the Ming dynasty in a series of political events and philosophical achievements, it narrates this longue durée in terms of the habits and strains of everyday life. Peppered with stories of real people and their negotiations of a rapidly changing world, this book provides a new way of seeing the Ming dynasty that not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of the period but also provides an entertaining and accessible introduction to Chinese history for anyone.
Modality in English and Chinese
Modality is a grammatical, or semantic-grammatical, category. It is an important component of human languages. This is at least the case in most European languages. To what extent is it a near-universal? This thesis is to contribute to the question. It focuses on modal verbs in English and Chinese, two genetically and geographically unrelated languages, and analyzes what these two languages have in common and how they differ in their systems of modality. To achieve the aim, the thesis adopts the theoretical framework proposed by van der Auwera (1996, 1998 with Plungian, 2001) for the typological study of modality. Its language-specific descriptions involve the morphosyntactic features, notio...
Out of the Margins
The novel Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan), China's earliest full-length narrative in vernacular prose, first appeared in print in the sixteenth century. The tale of one hundred and eight bandit heroes evolved from a long oral tradition; in its novelized form, it played a pivotal role in the rise of Chinese vernacular fiction, which flourished during the late Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) periods. Liangyan Ge's multidimensional study considers the evolution of Water Margin and the rise of vernacular fiction against the background of the vernacularization of premodern Chinese literature as a whole. This gradual and arduous process, as the book convincingly shows, was driven by sustained co...
The Figurative Works of Chen Hongshou (1599?652)
Despite the importance of Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) as an artist and scholar of the Ming period, until now no full length study in English has focused on his work. Author Tamara H. Bentley takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach, treating Chen's oeuvre in relation to literary themes and economic changes, and linking these larger concerns to visual analyses. Considering Chen's paintings and prints alongside Chen's romance drama commentaries and prefaces and his collected writings (particularly poetry), Bentley sheds new light not only on Chen, but also on an important cultural moment in the first half of the seventeenth century. Through analysis of Chen's figure paintings and print designs...
The Eternal Present of the Past
Drawing together illustration, theater, and literature, this study examines a late Ming conception of the stage as a mystical space for temporal conflation that allowed the past to be reborn in the present and to uphold the continuity of the cultural tradition
