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The Talented Women of the Zhang Family
"There is absolutely nothing remotely like this book in the history of late imperial women. [An] immensely important book."—Gail Hershatter, author of Women in China's Long Twentieth Century "A masterful work."—Lynn Hunt, coeditor of Beyond the Cultural Turn
Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction
This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ‘fictions of gender’, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. ...
On Their Own Terms
In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.
Grounds of Judgment
Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, the nineteenth century encounter between East Asia and the Western world has been narrated as a legal encounter. Commercial treaties--negotiated by diplomats and focused on trade--framed the relationships among Tokugawa-Meiji Japan, Qing China, Choson Korea, and Western countries including Britain, France, and the United States. These treaties created a new legal order, very different than the colonial relationships that the West forged with other parts of the globe, which developed in dialogue with local precedents, local understandings of power, and local institutions. They established the rules by which foreign sojourners worked in East Asia, ...
Modernisation of Chinese Culture
The editors are grateful to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for its generous support of their research work which enabled them to publish the present book. The present book carefully maps the Chinese modernisation discourse, highlighting its relationship to other, similar discourses, and situating it within historical and theoretical contexts. In contrast to the majority of recent discussions of a “Chinese development model” that tend to focus more on institutional then cultural factors, and are more narrowly concerned with economic matters than overall social development, the book offers several important focal points for many presently overlooked issues and dilemmas. The multifaceted p...
A Cultural History of Modern Science in China
Historians of science and Sinologists have long needed a unified narrative to describe the Chinese development of modern science, medicine, and technology since 1600. They welcomed the appearance in 2005 of Benjamin Elman's masterwork, On Their Own Terms. Now Elman has retold the story of the Jesuit impact on late imperial China, circa 1600-1800, and the Protestant era in early modern China from the 1840s to 1900 in a concise and accessible form ideal for the classroom. This coherent account of the emergence of modern science in China places that emergence in historical context for both general students of modern science and specialists of China.
A Language for the World
This intellectual history of Standard Swahili explores the long-term, intertwined processes of standard making and community creation in the historical, political, and cultural contexts of East Africa and beyond. Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. The book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard—a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes—negatively affected those whose language was s...
Drama Kings
In this colorful and detailed history, Joshua Goldstein describes the formation of the Peking opera in late Qing and its subsequent rise and re-creation as the epitome of the Chinese national culture in Republican era China. Providing a fascinating look into the lives of some of the opera’s key actors, he explores their methods for earning a living; their status in an ever-changing society; the methods by which theaters functioned; the nature and content of performances; audience make-up; and the larger relationship between Peking opera and Chinese nationalism. Propelled by a synergy of the commercial and the political patronage from the Qing court in Beijing to modern theaters in Shanghai...
Why Concepts Matter: Translating Social and Political Thought
Translation is indispensible to transmissions of knowledge across time and place; to understanding how and what others think. There is a vast stock of theories about how to translate, deriving mainly from controversies about sacred and literary works. Yet there is little discussion of the distinctive issues involved in translating political and social thought. This volume breaks new ground by focusing on them. Thirteen scholars consider problems arising from the study of translation and the cultural transfer of texts. Especially novel is the application of these issues to two relatively new disciplines: translation studies, and the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte). This volume opens a discussion of what and how each of them can learn from, and contribute to, the others.
The Discovery of Chinese Logic
Until 1898, Chinese and foreign scholars agreed that China had never known, needed, or desired a field of study similar in scope and purpose to European logic. Less than a decade later, Chinese literati claimed that the discipline had been part of the empire’s learned heritage for more than two millennia. This book analyzes the conceptual, ideological, and institutional transformations that made this drastic change of opinion possible and acceptable. Reconstructing the discovery of Chinese logic as a paradigmatic case of the epistemic shifts that continue to shape interpretations of China’s intellectual history, it offers a fresh view of the formation of modern academic discourses in East Asia and adds a neglected chapter to the global histories of science and philosophy.
