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One of the great classic Chinese novels, The Scholars departs from the impersonal tradition of Chinese fiction, as the author makes significant use of autobiographical experience and models many characters on friends and relatives.
From the back cover: "One of the great Chinese novels, The Scholars, departs from the impersonal tradition of Chinese fiction, as the author makes significant use of autobiographical experience and models many characters on friends and relatives. An eighteenth century satire, it is outstanding among Chinese classic novels. The author mercilessly exposes the decadence of the literati produced by the feudal examination system, the disastrous effects of that institution, and the corruption of the feudal society. A literary masterpiece of the Ming Dynasty, this landmark work was the first in China to criticize social abuse."
Rulin waishi (The Unofficial History of the Scholars) is more than a landmark in the history of the Chinese novel. This eighteenth-century work, which was deeply embedded in the intellectual and literary discourses of its time, challenges the reader to come to grips with the mid-Qing debates over ritual and ritualism, and the construction of history, narrative, and lyricism. Wu Jingzi’s (1701–54) ironic portrait of literati life was unprecedented in its comprehensive treatment of the degeneration of mores, the predicaments of official institutions, and the Confucian elite’s futile struggle to reassert moral and cultural authority. Like many of his fellow literati, Wu found the vernacul...
Eminent Chinese of the Qing Period was first developed under the auspices of the US Library of Congress during World War II. This much-loved work, edited by Arthur W. Hummel Sr., was meticulously compiled and unique in its scope, and quickly became the standard biographical reference for the Qing dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1911/2. Amongst the contributors are John King Fairbank, Têng Ssû-yü, L. Carrington Goodrich, C. Martin Wilbur, Fêng Chia-shêng, Knight Biggerstaff, and Nancy Lee Swann. The 2018 Berkshire edition contains the original eight hundred biographical sketches as well as the original front and back matter, including the preface by Hu Shih, a scholar who had been Chi...
Examining three works of vernacular fiction dating from 1750 to 1828, this book studies the intellectual and literary factors that in the mid-Qing dynasty contributed to the development of vernacular fiction of unprecedented scholarly and satirical sophistication.
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In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until it became identifiable with history itself. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese—often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude—this book places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers modern Chinese history as a complex of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and personal articulations of bygone and ongoing events. His discussion ranges from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of hunger and starvation to the technology of crime and punishment.
Stephen Owen is James Bryant Conant Professor of Chinese at Harvard University. --Book Jacket.
The first biographical dictionary in any Western language devoted solely to Chinese women, this reference is the product of years of research, translation, and writing by a team of over 60 China scholars from around the world. Compiled from a wide array of original sources, these detailed biographies present the lives, work, and significance of more than 200 Chinese women from many different backgrounds and areas of interest.