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Covers topics related to the understanding of Chinese Confucianism. Includes entries in the following categories: arts, architecture, and iconography; astrology, cosmology, and mythology; biographical entries; ceremonies, practices, and rituals; concepts; dynasties, official titles, and rulers; geography and historical events; groups and schools; literature, language, and symbols; and texts.
Drawing from a broad array of literary, historical, dramatic and anecdotal sources, Yenna Wu makes a rich exploration of an unusually prominent theme in premodern Chinese prose fiction and drama: that of jealous and belligerent wives, or viragos, who dominate their husbands and abuse other women. Focusing on Chinese literary works from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, she presents many colorful perspectives on this type of aggression, reviewing early literary and historical examples of the phenomenon. Wu argues that although the various portraits of the virago often reveal the writers' insecurities about strong-willed women in general, the authors also satirize the kind of man whose behavioral patterns have been catalysts for female aggression. She also shows that, while the women in these works are to some extent male constructs designed to affirm the patriarchal system, various elements of these portraits constitute a subversive form of parody that casts a revealing light on the patriarchal hierarchy of premodern China.
Beginning in the late Southern Sung one sect of Confucianism gradually came to dominate literati culture and, by the Ming dynasty, was canonized as state orthodoxy. This book is a historical and textual critique of the construction of an ideologically exclusionary conception of the Confucian tradition, and how claims to possession of the truth—the Tao—came to serve power.
In imperial China, workers drawn from the local populace performed many of the basic functions of local administration. Standing between the rulers and the ruled, these men mediated in both directions. McKnight's study concentrates on the nature of this village-level subbureaucratic activity in the Sung period; it sheds new light on the emergence of early Chinese society while providing a background against which to assess social changes during later dynasties.
Chiang Ching-kuo, son and political heir of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was born in 1910, when Chinese women, nearly all illiterate, hobbled about on bound feet and men wore pigtails as symbols of subservience to the Manchu Dynasty. In his youth Ching-kuo was a Communist and a Trotskyite, and he lived twelve years in Russia. He died in 1988 as the leader of Taiwan, a Chinese society with a flourishing consumer economy and a budding but already wild, woolly, and open democracy. He was an actor in many of the events of the last century that shaped the history of China's struggles and achievements in the modern era: the surge of nationalism among Chinese youth, the grand appeal of Marxism-Le...
Recent archaeological finds in China have made possible a reconstruction of the ancient history of Sichauan, the country's most populous province. Excavated artifacts and newly recovered texts can now supplement traditional textual materials. Combing these materials, Sage shows how Sichauan matured from peripheral obscurity to attain central importance in the formation of the Chinese empire during the first millennium B.C.